How to represent true colours?

[gayle23]

To get accurate colors you should be shooting with a color chart and editing on a calibrated monitor.

But even if you do all of that you are posting them on ebay and you have absolutely no control over the screens that people are looking at ebay on. So do your best to get it close and then don't worry about it to much.

Okay thank you. There are loads of things that I don't understand in all these reply's but that is fine as I am looking them up one by one and learning little by little! No idea how to shoot with a colour chart or what a calibrated monitor is but I will find out! Thanks again

 

[gayle23]

Wandering if anyone can help me quickly. I've been taking photos of clothes to sell on ebay, I have a vibrant bright emerald green dress which in my pictures when I play them back is coming out like a dull mossy green. How can I get it to capture the actual colour? It just got me wandering and I couldn't work it out.

Sorry, there is not fast answer, but I can make the answer short:

1) If the color is within the target gamut, very probably sRGB ECI Downloads [ECI.ORG] you simply calibrate your light / camera setup with a color checker and use the calibration of your RAW converter (ACR and PN offer calibration, other RAW converters too)

2) If the color is outside the target gamut you have to cheat and test color variations in different Browsers and Operating systems on a calibrated output system until it resembles the original.

I shot shirts for a living. I know what I am talking about.

Thank you Frank, absolutely no idea what you mean but I intend to learn and one day it will all make sense to me!

 

[gayle23]

Hi Lew, I had deleted the original but I took another though it was in different light just to show how the colour comes out. Thanks. ps. I have learned what EXIF is now!

 

[petrochemist]

Hi Lew, I had deleted the original but I took another though it was in different light just to show how the colour comes out. Thanks. ps. I have learned what EXIF is now!

Among the EXIF I came across:
'Light Source / White Balance = unknown (0)
Flash = Flash did not fire'
and didn't see anything else for white balance (WB).
My camera wouldn't show unknown like that it would list whichever WB was used including auto if that was selected.

Mixed lighting will usually give problems with colours, but with e-bay sales you should get a reasonably close approximation as long as the WB matches the lighting. As mentioned above the buyers monitor is unlikely to be calibrated so getting it exactly right is not that important IMO.

Light from a clear sky will be bluer than direct sunshine, which will be much bluer than tungsten light. In most cases Auto WB will be reasonable but for best results you should manually pick the WB to suit the lighting. The camera should have a very accurate idea of the colour of it's built in flash, so that might be the easiest approach for you.

 

[The_Traveler]

My guess would be that the dress is large in the field, thus the auto WB sees that the field average is weighted heavily towards the green and adjusts the color balance so that the greens are averaged down.

You have plenty of pixels.
I suggest you try an experiment.

Back off so that the dress fills only a much smaller part of the field - and include a couple of other articles in red and blue.
Then take pictures with Auto WB, custom wb, tungsten, sun, shade and whatever you have (pin a card with the setting on the wall) and see which one looks closest.

 

[Frank F.]

Is the color of the shot you just presented close to what you see or is it far off?

To me the color looks Emerald which usually does not cause much trouble, while Petrol colors, very strong blue and green at the same time fall out of gamut quite regularly.

Target Gamut is "all the colors that can be displayed on the target device"

The people who make computers and Smart devices try to stick to a standard gamut called "sRGB ECI" which you should use at the end of your editing to make your picture max compatibility with most devices.

Most cameras offer "sRGB" as the default recording gamut. Stick to it when target is also sRGB.

 

[adamhiram]

I think your quickest fix would be to simply use the white balance eyedropper tool somewhere on the door behind it, which looks to be a pretty neutral white. It won't be perfect, but it should get you close.

 

[ashleykaryl]

Is this something you can reshoot? If so try the following steps:

1) Ensure your exposure is correct.

2) Set a custom white balance under fixed, even lighting using a neutral grey card. This should be under the same lighting as your clothes.

3) Import the Raw files onto the computer. Your images should look good.

4) Export as sRGB Jpeg at the required size.

That is an ultra simplified workflow that assumes you do not have a calibrated display, studio lighting or a ColorChecker Passport for camera calibration. The latter item would help you to achieve really accurate colour.

This is a colour management issue and you simply need to follow a few steps to obtain accurate colour. The worst thing you can do is to mess around editing on an uncalibrated display.

Sampling the white background with the eyedropper may get you closer than you are currently but it's still likely to produce false colours because it's almost certainly not completely neutral.

 

[gayle23]

My guess would be that the dress is large in the field, thus the auto WB sees that the field average is weighted heavily towards the green and adjusts the color balance so that the greens are averaged down.

You have plenty of pixels.
I suggest you try an experiment.

Back off so that the dress fills only a much smaller part of the field - and include a couple of other articles in red and blue.
Then take pictures with Auto WB, custom wb, tungsten, sun, shade and whatever you have (pin a card with the setting on the wall) and see which one looks closest.

Thanks for that, that makes sense, I will give that a go very soon (been hectic here!). My original picture wasn't so big in the field but there weren't any other colours nearby like you said that would adjust the colour balance. Thank you for all your help sharing your knowledge, truly, this forum is just so useful for beginners like me!

 

[gayle23]

Is this something you can reshoot? If so try the following steps:

1) Ensure your exposure is correct.

2) Set a custom white balance under fixed, even lighting using a neutral grey card. This should be under the same lighting as your clothes.

3) Import the Raw files onto the computer. Your images should look good.

4) Export as sRGB Jpeg at the required size.

That is an ultra simplified workflow that assumes you do not have a calibrated display, studio lighting or a ColorChecker Passport for camera calibration. The latter item would help you to achieve really accurate colour.

This is a colour management issue and you simply need to follow a few steps to obtain accurate colour. The worst thing you can do is to mess around editing on an uncalibrated display.

Sampling the white background with the eyedropper may get you closer than you are currently but it's still likely to produce false colours because it's almost certainly not completely neutral.

Yes I can totally retake the photos, they were not that important to me they just made me question what was happening with the colour. I have a lot to learn! Thank you so much for all this advice.

 

[greybeard]

Wandering if anyone can help me quickly. I've been taking photos of clothes to sell on ebay, I have a vibrant bright emerald green dress which in my pictures when I play them back is coming out like a dull mossy green. How can I get it to capture the actual colour? It just got me wandering and I couldn't work it out.

I comes out mossy green on ? Your camera monitor or what? What camera are you using and what are using for light? All in all, we just need more information to give you any meaningful advice.

 

[TCampbell]

Back in the film days, you could select your film type by the results you wanted. There were films that represented colors in soft gentle hues (think "pastel-like") and then there were films that could produce jammy saturated "in your face" color. There were also films that represented more faithful color (being neither subdued nor saturated).

It turns out within your camera you can likely also set the behavior of the camera. But these tend to get applied IF you shoot JPEG. If you shoot RAW then the color choices me stored with the shooting information but not actually applied to the image (it would be up to the computer software to apply changes.)

This is the long way of saying "your camera may be deliberately altering your colors" because that's actually a creative choice some people make... on purpose.

The camera's color filter array and also the lighting you use will impact the color. If the lighting has a warmer "yellow" tone that they will tint all the colors in your image. It's difficult to correct these colors if you don't have *something* in the image with a well-known color... and this is the idea behind the "gray card".

A color camera registeres some amount of "red", "green", and "blue" light. You can represent every color hue, brightness, and saturation level simply by manipulating the amount of each of those three components.

If you knew what color something was actually supposed to be... and you knew what color you had in your image, then you could subtract or add some components of the red, green, and/or blue to revert those colors back to what they were supposed to be.

So this is the whole point of the "gray card". It's a piece of material that has a is guaranteed to be a perfectly neutral "gray" (the amount of R, G, & B should be absolutely equal.) The idea is you place this in your scene and snap a photo... then snap all the rest of the photos you plan to shoot (in the identical lighting situation). The photo editing software can use the gray card as a balanced source because it knows the amount of R, G, & B levels should be identical... so when they're not identical in the "photo" (but should be if the colors are "true") then maybe your gray card photoed just a little bit too much to a red color-cast... the computer can back off the red. But that gray card is basically telling you that the either the camera or the lighting was responsible for the gray card being too red... so you could subtract the same red percentage from EVERY PIXEL IN THE IMAGE and that would bring the image back to true color.

That's the theory and if the wonky color was merely a matter of "light" having a color cast, then it would work. But it turns out every camera also has a filter which trims light to mimic the sensitivity of the human eye (the human eye is NOT equally sensitive to each color). So it's possible a camera might over-saturate some colors but undersaturated others and a straight across-the-board correction wouldn't be 100% accurate. For those cases there's a physical device you can get called a color-checker. It's just a card with colored squares on it. But each color is a specific "known" color. You can use the color checker in the same way that you'd use a gray card... put in the photo and take a shot with that card. The computer can use that color-card as a color-reference to determine how the camera and lighting treated each color and since the computer knows what the colors were "supposed to be" (vs. what they actually are) it can now figure out how to correct so that everything is accurate.

So the summary of this is... using tools that simply have "known" color levels can let you determine how your camera and lighting were effecting the them and your software can back out the changes to get you back to true colors.

But there is a little more to this...

Your MONITOR can be responsible for putting a color cast into your images. So even if your camera NAILED the colors, you might perceive wrong colors because your monitor is putting to much "yellow" or too much "blue", etc. To fix that, you need a monitor calibration tool (X-Rite ColorMunki or Datacolor Spyder). These let you calibrate your "display" and they build a color profile that your operating system uses so that YOUR monitor displays things in correct colors. Some versions of these tools can be used to profile your printer/paper/ink combination to get your pinter to produce accurate colors.

And that leaves the last problem... what if YOUR camera, monitor, and printer are all accurate... but you're displaying this image on the web... and the person who is viewing your image does NOT have a color-calibrated monitor (and most people do not have color calibrated monitors). All you can do at that point is take solace in knowing that YOU did as much as you can do. You can't reach out across the internet and color calibrate their monitor... they'd need to get their own monitor calibration tool and do that.