Yes, even when I am procrastinating and playing a game on my iphone, I am thinking about color. I Love Hue and I love Hue Too are excellent time sucks and also excellent visual practice for color perception.
The premise is simple. You are given a grid of color tiles and your task is to rearrange them into “perfectly ordered spectrums.” What the heck does this mean? Essentially, you are trying to find the correct middle mixture between two tiles over and over again to fill in the grid of colors. Let me back up… a middle mixture has equal amounts of two colors. For example, the mixture of 50% yellow and 50% green would be yellow-green.
Finding a middle mixture between two colors is pretty easy when there are only a few tiles in between. It becomes more challenging when there are whole bunch of tiles between them, or when both end colors are not pure, such as a dark muddy cool yellow and a light muddy warm green.
One trick to know if you are on the right track is to look for a fluting effect. Imagine a yellow tile and a green tile again with the yellow tile on the left and green tile on the right… if the tile between them is the middle mixture of the two then its right edge will appear to be yellow and its left edge will appear to be blue. No fluting means you haven’t found the middle mixture.
It gets a bit more complicated in that in order for a middle mixture to be perceived as a middle mixture it also has to be halfway between its two parent colors in terms of its lightness/darkness (its value) and its brightness/dullness (its saturation). So if the “yellow-green” hue is too dark or too light, or too dull or too bright then it won’t look like the middle mixture. When you get stuck playing I Love Hue (and you will get stuck) try to think about all three attributes.
Some of the advanced levels are maddeningly difficult in a good way. I have a fellow professor friend who likes to play I Love Hue on her subway commutes. We have yet to come across a level that stumps us both, but a few have come close!