As a novice in the art of mushroom identification I have come up against the challenge of color. Verbal descriptions do not have a universal unifomity, nor is there agreement on what visual color matches a given description.

Is there some use for a light or color meter that reads angstroms or some such thing to give a scientific, objective standard for what we then interpret as color? Even if our subjective experience is somewhat different, wouldn't agreement that a given thing reflects light of a certain measured intensity and hue at a certain number of angstroms work?

And is there a modestly priced and readily available instrument to do such measurements reliably?

Geologists and archaeologists use Munsell color charts to objectively describe soil colors. The range of colors should be wide enough to encompass what you would encounter on shrooms.

The charts, while not dirt cheap, are relatively inexpensive

Dweste,

The idea of measuring color by wavelength (angstrom,nanometer) or by frequencty, or by temperature, only applies if the color you are trying to render is a singular component, or pure color. Most of the colors in nature are a blend of two other colors, or frequencies, such as any brown color is a mix of two or more colors at fairly opposite ends of the spectrum (red and green make a base brown). Then there is the question of intensity, which further complicates the issue. You can render any color variation using the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow)in combinations and instensities, except for flourescent colors, which involve another spectral issue altogether.

Color charts are the best way to go. For that, I would suggest an interior design/paint department.

Good luck.

Nope. Not even with a Erlangen micro-light guide spectrophotometer.

Kind of hard to describe standard colours when the mushrooms don't comply.
If all the specimens of a type were exactly the same colour then you might be able to describe that colour exactly but they don't.
That is why you sometimes see the colour given as a range of colours.

Also note that with most mushrooms the colours change depending on age and on how dry or wet the mushroom is.
For an example you can take the common Agaricus bitorquis.
The gills are usually quite pale when young, and as the mushroom gets older they turn darker until they are quite brown, almost black.

I've read somewhere that the most scientific and reliable approach to mushrooms identification is by comparing their spores. You'll need a microscope for that, however it seems more doable than using a color measuring device. By the way, it's quite easy to make such a device. Just use a digital camera with fixed power flash and manual (not automatic) presets options for white balance, aperture, and shutter speed to photograph mushrooms from a certain constant distance. And then use some graphics editor to extract and compare the color components values (e.g. in RGB) from a slightly blurred images. However you are on your own in building of the comparison / identification chart from scratch with this method.

IMHO, the best way for the field identification would be a step by step features separation guide, like one I saw for trees and another - for insects (where you have to go through the enumerated list of questions regarding the observable features of a specimen, while determining the number of the next question from the answer to the current one). Is there something like that available for the mushrooms? If not, it should be a great opportunity for a bestseller book.

To add to the complexity, to completely describe the color of an object, you'd have to describe how it would look under any given light. It would be a graph. It's the amount of light reflected at different wavelengths by a particular light source that gives an object its color. As an example, it's very possible to have something that looks purple under daylight, but blue under a 100w bulb.

In printing and industrial design, one solution is to use reference standard patches of color, Pantone is one example, to specify a color. That's a common way to let people talking about 'blue' talk about more or less the same shade of blue - pantone 359 for example. They also have standard reference lights. For color printing, having a monitor calibrated to a standard helps, but isn't all that great at referencing the color of a reflected color.