Friday, December 01, 2006
Pictures too cold?
A customer asked me the other day about his pictures being too cold. I thought that the answer below might help others too. If you are selling products on eBay or on your own web page, cold (too blue) pictures don't get the potential customers attention as well as slightly warmer pictures. My experience has been that most people have their monitors set too blue inorder to increase the visual contrast.
To off set this I try to make my pictures slightly on the warm side. Warm and fuzzy sells, cold usually does not.
If you want a slightly warm effect in your pictures, they need to be just a little on the yellow/red side. Assuming that the color/white balance was correct when the picture was taken, you would add a little yellow and a little red in PhotoShop. To be technically correct you should first match the color of your lights to the white balance of the camera. This is done by setting the white balance to tungsten (if using tungsten bulbs or daylight if using the blue daylight bulbs) or do a custom white balance on the camera. Be sure that the rest of the lights are off in the room. Also, you cannot mix the different lights. That causes weird shadows etc.
Next you should do the same on your computer. There are several devices out there that
allow you to set the monitor correctly. This is what most people forget to do. Our brains automatically adjust the color that we see, so usually the color on the monitor looks good as long as we know what the item is supposed to look like.
If you use the tungsten lights with the camera set on daylight, all of the pictures will be very, very yellow. Usually too yellow to fix. You can take the yellow out, but it's much more difficult to put the proper amount of blue back in.
So, if you want a warm effect, just slightly yellow red, adjust your color balance in PhotoShop by adding a little red and yellow to the correct color balanced picture.
To off set this I try to make my pictures slightly on the warm side. Warm and fuzzy sells, cold usually does not.
If you want a slightly warm effect in your pictures, they need to be just a little on the yellow/red side. Assuming that the color/white balance was correct when the picture was taken, you would add a little yellow and a little red in PhotoShop. To be technically correct you should first match the color of your lights to the white balance of the camera. This is done by setting the white balance to tungsten (if using tungsten bulbs or daylight if using the blue daylight bulbs) or do a custom white balance on the camera. Be sure that the rest of the lights are off in the room. Also, you cannot mix the different lights. That causes weird shadows etc.
Next you should do the same on your computer. There are several devices out there that
allow you to set the monitor correctly. This is what most people forget to do. Our brains automatically adjust the color that we see, so usually the color on the monitor looks good as long as we know what the item is supposed to look like.If you use the tungsten lights with the camera set on daylight, all of the pictures will be very, very yellow. Usually too yellow to fix. You can take the yellow out, but it's much more difficult to put the proper amount of blue back in.
So, if you want a warm effect, just slightly yellow red, adjust your color balance in PhotoShop by adding a little red and yellow to the correct color balanced picture.
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The shades of your "warmer" shot is still off. I can still clearly see a bluish hue in the shaded areas under the necks
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