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Neutral Hunt

spot the true neutral among the near-greys

round
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score
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best
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Screen check: turn Night Shift / f.lux / any blue-light filter off and put the brightness up. The last grids measure colour casts of about 4 units — a warm screen filter hides them completely.

Finding the grey with nothing in it

Nine chips arrive in a 3×3 grid, all at roughly the same lightness (L* 50–65) so brightness gives nothing away. Eight carry a temperature cast, their hues at least 25° apart; one is a true neutral, chroma under 0.5. Tap that one. Five grids make a round and the casts thin out as it goes, from around C 10–16 at the start to C 5–7 on the last. Every attempt reveals what each chip was really carrying — “warm +7”, “cool +4”, “neutral” — with violet and magenta named as themselves, since their temperature depends on what surrounds them.

The eye this trains is the one that catches a cast on the palette rather than on the canvas: greys mixed from other colours rarely land neutral, and a faint warmth nobody notices in the mixing tray is a warmth that ends up in the painting. Comparing chips against their neighbours is the way through, because a cast only shows next to a rival. Screens matter here too — the drill opens with a short check about blue-light filters, and the late grids stop shrinking at 5 units because an uncalibrated laptop panel cannot show less.

What a wrong chip is still worth

Finding the neutral scores 100. A miss keeps some credit, worked out as 100 × clamp(1 − C/Cmax, 0, 1) × 0.55, where C is the cast on the chip you chose and Cmax is the strongest cast on that grid — so falling for a chip that was nearly neutral pays better than falling for an obvious one. Grading each miss against its own grid is deliberate. Since the casts get fainter as the round goes on, one yardstick held across all five would hand out more credit for failing grid 5 than for failing grid 1. The round is the mean of five. Tapping at random settles near 19. The chips are generated in CIELAB, so every cast is a number the drill already holds rather than something a model has to detect.

More colour drills: Temperature Sort · Colour Constancy · Sun & Sky · the whole catalogue