Photography and Camera Colour

How a camera turns light into colour, why phones disagree with each other, why product photos lie, what colour grading and film processes do to a picture, and how to get colour you can trust from a photograph.

Colour in photographs of people is covered as optics, never as a judgement about the person. Screen display of the result lives in Digital Colour.

17 topics · 88 evidence-labelled claims · 48 sources

Capture

Sensors, white balance, exposure and RAW.

How does a digital camera record colour, and why is it not the same as seeing?Most camera sensors are colour-blind silicon under a mosaic of red, green and blue filters, usually in the Bayer pattern of two g…What does white balance actually do to a photo's colours?White balance multiplies the camera's red, green and blue channels by different amounts so that something neutral in the scene co…What is the colour difference between shooting RAW and JPEG?A raw file is the sensor's own linear measurements, one colour per pixel, before white balance, colour conversion and tone curves…Why do bright skies turn cyan and bright skin turn yellow in photos?Each colour channel has a ceiling.Why do cameras render the same skin so differently, and sometimes so badly?A camera makes three decisions that fall hardest on faces: how bright to make the picture, what colour to call the light, and how…

Processing

Profiles, tone curves and smartphone pipelines.

What is a camera colour profile, and why does changing it change my colours?A camera profile tells raw software how to turn one camera's sensor values into standard colour.What does a smartphone do to colour between the sensor and the photo?A phone photo is usually built from several frames, not one.Why do two phones photograph the same scene in different colours?Two phones differ at every stage: their sensors' spectral sensitivities, their lenses and filters, the white balance each guesses…Why do sunset photos look more saturated than the real sky — or sometimes much duller?A sunset is a hard scene for a camera: a huge brightness range, light that is itself strongly coloured, and saturated oranges and…

Grading and film looks

Colour grading, film stocks and lab processes, tone mapping and HDR.

What is colour grading, and how is it different from colour correction?Colour correction makes pictures technically consistent: neutral whites, matched exposure, shots that agree with each other.What gives a film, or a film stock, its colour palette and 'look'?A film's palette is made in four places: what is put in front of the camera, how the camera or stock records it, what the laborat…What is tone mapping, and what does an HDR photo actually store?Tone mapping is the step that squeezes the brightness range of a real scene into the much smaller range a screen or print can sho…

Getting it right

Grey cards, targets, mixed lighting and reflective subjects.

Why does the product I bought look a different colour from its photo?Between the product and your eye sit a light source, a camera's guesses, an editor's choices, a web image pipeline and your scree…Why does a black or navy garment turn purple or brown in some photos?Some dyes reflect strongly in the near-infrared, just beyond the red the eye can see.Why can't I get the colours right when a room has both daylight and lamps?White balance applies one correction to the whole image, but a room lit by a window and a warm lamp has two illuminants.What is a grey card for, and why is it 18% grey?A grey card is a spectrally flat neutral surface you photograph in the same light as your subject, so that white balance and expo…Why are glass, metal, liquids and backlit fabric so hard to photograph in the right colour?Because most of what the camera records from them is not their own colour.

Tools for this

Image palette and pixel picker
Read colours from a photograph, on your own device.
Colour Lab
See what a screen can and cannot show.

See every colour tool