Three Dimensional Colour Pickers

Colours are three dimensional data. However, all commercial colour pickers project three-dimensional (3-D) colour spaces into two dimensional (2-D) palettes. The projection often results in a set of colours perceptually inappropriate to describe the data they present. This paper initially compares several popular 2-D colour pickers and then describes some novel colour pickers which allow colour selection in 3-D RGB, HSV and Munsell colour spaces. The colour palette is a slice cut off by a translucent plane from 3-D colour solids. The position of the plane tells the user where they are in the colour space, which we believe can facilitate the colour picking process. We also develop a mechanism to generate gradually changing colours between several pre-selected colours through interpolation. Users are allowed to change the interpolation path freely in the colour palette.