I’ve never been lucky enough to own my own home, and/or have responsibility for decorating my own place.
If I did, it would no doubt end up as a higgledy-piggledy mish-mash of creative ideas, at least until I found something that appealed, and then I’d do some serious fine-tuning.
Either way, it wouldn’t be any worse than the paint job in my current rental property!
I digress.
I may not have experienced the stresses of decorating for myself, but I can empathise with those that have.
If you’re in the process of decorating or working on any project that requires a specific combination of colours, you should probably avoid using your phone when it comes to collecting samples.
Cameras can’t see colour
Did you know that cameras can’t actually “see” colour? Each camera – whether it’s a high-end DSLR, a compact camera, or the camera on your phone – requires a filter to turn the information it acquires from a scene into an all-singing, all-dancing colour photo.
This is why you may have heard photographers talking about colour profiles, and how they prefer one particular brand of camera to another.
Personally, I love the vibrance and range of Fujifilm. Combined with their classically-designed cameras and user-friendly interface, I’ve never been tempted to use any other brand.
Colour samples
So how does this relate to your phone camera?
Have a look at these three photos. They’re all the same, but I’ve made some minor tweaks to the colours to represent the differences between cameras.
The one on the left is the original photo from my phone. It looks like it’s done a decent job, but the two images to the right have only been adjusted very slightly, and could easily have come from a different camera.
When professionally editing photos, often the first change to make is to adjust the white balance. This is a scale from blue to yellow – or cold to warm. Every camera brand defaults to a slightly different position on this scale. With my Fujifilm equipment I often find that I end up warming the photos ever-so-slightly.
If there is incandescent or fluorescent lighting in your scene, your camera will often try to compensate by adjusting the colour accordingly, and it doesn’t always get it right!
This is why you can’t trust colour representation in your phone.
So what should you do?
If you have a very specific colour to match (i.e. vanilla white vs custard white or whatever they call them 🤣) then you’ll need to physically take the sample and put it side-by-side against your target colour.
Or if you’re my landlord, just think “sod it, it’ll do”…
