I have recently gone down the rabbit hole of the Munsell color system. It was developed in 1915 by Albert Munsell. It is a color identification and notation system. It is very specific. For example instead of saying you need the color orange you may say I need a yellow/red hue 5R with a value of 8 and chroma of 6.
Most of us learn to mute colors or knock back a colors vibrancy by adding the complimentary color to the mix. In other words, if I am painting a blue sky and mix a vibrant blue and realize it is too blue and needs to be less intense or less chromatic I would mix in a bit of orange. Orange has a wide range so which one? It is really by trial and error and experience that you get the correct color. With Munsell artists use a gray scale to mute the chroma.
Munsell uses three words to describe the color. The first is hue: (what color is it? Red, Yellow /Red, Green/Yellow, Yellow, Green, Blue/Green, Blue, Purple/Blue, Purple and Red/Purple. The second is value. How light or dark is it? The value scale has 9 values plus white and black. 9 is the lightest value. The third is chroma. How intense and powerful is the color?
There are many books, tools and charts that you can buy to help learn this system. I have the student book edition 6 with cut out cards.
Each of the 10 colors hues has a page in the student book. In the complete set each of the color hues has 4 pages.
Excited to see where this takes me! There are classes online that teach this technique. Kathleen Speranza is great. https://www.kathleensperanza.com/
Very interesting