Short answer
Between the product and your eye sit a light source, a camera's guesses, an editor's choices, a web image pipeline and your screen, and each can shift colour. The most common culprits are lighting that differs from where you use the product, auto white balance on a background-dominated shot, retouching for appeal, images not tagged or displayed as sRGB, and your screen's settings. Materials that shift with light — some dyes, metallics, fluorescent colours — add metamerism on top.
Studio product photography typically uses flash or LED panels, and the colour recorded depends on their spectrum as well as on the product. Two materials that match under the studio light can separate under your warm living-room bulbs, or the reverse — illuminant metamerism. White and grey seamless backgrounds make auto white balance work harder: a product on a large white sweep can push exposure and balance off. Good studios set white balance and a camera profile from a target in the frame, but high-volume catalogue work is not always done that way.
Product images are routinely retouched — backgrounds whitened, dust removed, colour variants generated from one photograph by recolouring. Recolouring is a common source of mismatch: a garment shot in navy and digitally changed to forest green is an estimate of the green product, not a photo of it. Saturation and contrast are often raised to look good at thumbnail size. None of this is necessarily deceptive, but it means the image is a designed representation, not a measurement.
If a retailer offers several colours but every photo has identical folds and creases, some of those colours were probably generated rather than photographed.
Once online, images are resized and recompressed, sometimes stripped of their colour profile. A wide-gamut image shown in an app that ignores the profile looks duller or louder than intended, and an sRGB image shown unmanaged on a wide-gamut phone looks oversaturated. Your screen's brightness, night-shift warming and 'vivid' mode then add their own shift. This part is covered in depth on the digital colour pages; it is often as large as everything that happened in the studio.
Sellers get closer by photographing every colourway rather than recolouring, setting white balance from a grey card in the frame, profiling the camera for the studio light, exporting sRGB with the profile embedded, and describing colour in words alongside the photo. Buyers can view images on a calibrated or at least colour-managed screen with night modes off, compare against a known item from the same seller, and check return policies for colour-critical purchases such as paint, upholstery and clothing to be worn together.
Why: Studio LED spectrum and retouching favoured warmth; your room light differs.
Fix: Ask for a fabric swatch and view it in your room at different times of day.
Why: That colourway was recoloured digitally from another photo.
Fix: Look for photos with different folds or on a model; ask the seller.
Why: Unmanaged app displaying sRGB on a wide-gamut screen.
Fix: Check in the browser or system photo viewer; compare on a colour-managed display.
Each statement is labelled by kind — established fact, a standard’s requirement, observed market data, a convention, or Colourwise’s own interpretation or analysis — with the strength of the evidence behind it.
FactStrong evidence
Colour-managed display depends on images carrying or being assumed to have a defined colour space, with ICC profiles used to convert device values through a device-independent connection space.
Source: International Color Consortium: specifications and information; CSS Color Module Level 4
FactStrong evidence
Because camera sensitivities differ from the eye's, a camera can record as matching two materials that a viewer sees as different, and the reverse, and the effect depends on the light source.
Colourwise interpretationLimited evidence
Product images are commonly retouched and in some catalogues digitally recoloured, so they should be treated as representations rather than colour measurements.
Based on: Colourwise's reading of common e-commerce image production; no survey of retouching prevalence was found.
Caveat: Practice varies widely between retailers.
Reviewed 29 September 2026. Colourwise summarises its sources in its own words and does not reproduce standards text or proprietary colour data. Spotted an error? Tell us.