Photography help

Was dead chuffed this morning with my latest shopping work in progress. One of my patchwork bags in greens and mustard. I was really pleased with how it was turning out, but when I tried to photograph it it came out beige! Can Anyone please help with some advice


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Do you use any photo editing software - you may be able to adjust the temperature/tint to make the colours more true to life.

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Try reshooting it with a small piece of white card in one corner such that can be cropped out afterwards. You can then use this to correct the color cast in picasa or similar (there is normally a neutral colour picker tool, select that, then click on the white card and hey presto it should sort out the colour, then crop the picture). Unfortunately at this time of year when using natural light to shoot with you can get funny colour casts, whilst indoor lights are often a warm white which can confuse the camera (you would need to check/alter your white balance setting I think) and make everything look more yellowy.
Sasha

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When you photograph an object, the camera has no idea what colour the objects should be. It will adjust the colour balance based on what it thinks is a neutral white. If there is no bright neutral tone in the image, it will make a guess which can lead to a colour cast. If you’re shooting JPEG rather than RAW, it will help if the white balance setting on your camera is set for the lighting you were using at the time. As others have pointed out, you can correct the white balance in software provided you have a known neutral tone to sample. This will often get you in the right ball park but if you use a white card, you can still get errors if the white is over-exposed. For best results, use a mid-grey card. If the colour still looks wrong after this, there are two possibilities. One is that your camera calibration is off (even some top end cameras tend to get blues and purples wrong). The second is that your computer monitor is not showing you accurate colour. If you’re interested, I’m running a one-day workshop on behalf of Folksy in January near Oxford on the whole subject of product photography for non-photographers where I’ll be covering every aspect of the process from product to upload on Folksy.
PS If you use editing software to adjust the colour temperature and tint, be careful. Adjustments done by eye on an un-profiled monitor will just make it look good on your screen and you may in fact introduce colour errors. Also, you need to make sure your final image is tagged with the correct colour profile which should be sRGB not all photo editing software will show you this. If you’re still having trouble, send me an image at dave@ravello.co.uk and I’ll take a look at the colours for you.

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I think this is a common problem with certain colours. I’ve often seen on-line clothing retailers write a disclaimer under images of the yellow or pink versions of their item that the colour online does not reflect the true colour, and that the true colour is shown in the paper catalogue. It doesn’t help much but I sometimes find it comforting when I hit an issue the professionals struggle with :wink:

Love Sam x

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Oo, all you lovely, lovely people. Thank you for replying. Been at the sewing machine And have visitors in a mo’ but will read in depth later. Thank you :grinning: