Inspired by the professional Farnsworth-Munsell test. Tap two tiles to swap them until the row forms a smooth color gradient between the two fixed endpoints.
The Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue Test, developed by Dean Farnsworth in the 1940s, is a professional color-vision assessment used by ophthalmologists, optometrists, and in design and photography fields to quantify color discrimination ability along a continuous scale - rather than simply passing or failing a specific color-blindness category the way Ishihara plates do. This free color hue test brings that professional assessment format online.
The original test uses 85 colored caps that must be arranged in perfect hue order, with an error score calculated from how far each cap ends up from its correct position. This version simplifies that to a 12-tile version, but keeps the same core scoring principle: your error score reflects genuine hue-ordering precision, not just whether you can tell colors apart at all.
Beyond clinical eye exams, the Farnsworth-Munsell format is used in industries requiring precise color judgment - textile manufacturing, paint matching, and quality control for printed materials. Some jobs in these fields require candidates to pass a hue-arrangement test similar to this one as part of the hiring process.
Designers, photographers, and print professionals wanting to benchmark professional-grade color discrimination, job candidates preparing for color-sensitive roles, and anyone curious about their fine hue-ordering ability beyond simple color blindness screening will find this free test valuable.
This test is inspired by the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue Test, developed by physicist Dean Farnsworth in the 1940s originally for the U.S. Navy to screen personnel for color vision deficiencies relevant to signal lamp reading and other operational tasks. The original clinical test uses 85 colored caps that must be arranged in a continuous hue sequence, and the specific pattern of errors - not just the total error count - is used by eye care professionals to distinguish between different types of color vision deficiency, since protan, deutan, and tritan deficiencies each tend to produce characteristically different error patterns along the hue circle.
Unlike simpler color blindness screening tools such as Ishihara plates, which only tell you whether a deficiency is present, hue arrangement tests like this one are designed to also measure the severity and specific type of any discrimination difficulty, which is why they remain in clinical and occupational use for jobs with strict color vision requirements, such as certain aviation, electrical, and design roles.
Even people with completely normal color vision tend to make more errors in certain regions of the hue circle than others, particularly around the blue-green transition zone, because human color discrimination sensitivity is not uniform across all hues - some transitions are perceptually more gradual and therefore genuinely harder to order correctly than others, regardless of any underlying deficiency.
Color Blindness Test offers a faster plate-based screening if you want a quick check before attempting the more involved arrangement task, and Color Perception Test and Contrast Sensitivity Test cover related but distinct aspects of visual processing.
Color blindness tests check for specific deficiencies (like red-green confusion). This test measures continuous hue-discrimination precision, which is a genuinely different and more granular measure, even for people with completely normal color vision.
A score of 0-3 is already considered exceptional - even people with excellent color vision rarely achieve a perfect zero due to the inherent subtlety of adjacent hue steps.
Yes, completely free with instant error scoring and percentile comparison, no signup required.
It measures your ability to arrange colors in the correct hue order, revealing subtle deficiencies in color discrimination that basic color-blindness tests miss.
Yes, hue discrimination ability varies even among people with normal color vision, and factors like screen calibration, lighting, and fatigue affect performance.
Ishihara plates detect specific types of color blindness using number patterns, while a hue test measures fine-grained ordering ability across the full color spectrum.
Yes, monitor color calibration and brightness settings can shift how hues appear, so results are best used for relative self-tracking rather than absolute diagnosis.