The Right Color

After you have gone through so much time and effort to pick just the right colors in the right shades and hues, you pick up your photos and your beautiful ivory dress looks white, and your brides perfect shade of violet looks blue. You are beside yourself and voice your complaint.

This has been an on-going problem since I have been in the wedding photography business in the early 70’s, and from what I hear long before that. Think the new digital photographs solve the problem? Think again.

I have had to talk to many brides over the years about this and the biggest name in photography, Kodak had put out a press release explaining why this happens. While it’s been years since I have had to explain it, this is what I remember from Kodak.

The problem in not the film, equipment, or processing. It has to do with the color of the flash, the reflection of UV light, and the type and dyes used in the different materials for the girls dresses. The truth is the flashes on cameras cannot compare with the natural sunlight that allows us to see the true colors in real life. While I don’t doubt that a program like photoshop run by an expert can color the dress true color, this would be impractical for a thousand shots typically taken at a wedding.

The bride then has a choice. Although contrast and saturation can be manipulated by computor, color usually includes the entire photo. In other words to get a blue dress in a photo to look violet, we would have to add magenta or maybe red to the photo. That’s great, now the dress is the proper color, however now the skin tones are magenta or red and the people look horrible. So do you want nice color for the overall picture, or a bad color that will show the real dress color? Most brides opt for good color overall.

What I would suggest is that you ask the photographer to just take a picture of the dress from the neck down and you can then have the color on that one photo changed to match the real dress.

You might ask what would happen if the photog doesn’t use direct flash? The answer is that he/she can bounce the flash off the ceiling or walls, but the color of the light that bounces back will be changed by the color of the surface it’s bounced off of.

You may have better luck with outdoor photos showing true color. However my recommendation is that you never put all your eggs in one basket. Have a few taken indoors, some outdoors, some flash, some bounce, some available light. The available light photos will appear more green/blue if your light source is flouresant, regular lamp light will shade the photos heavy yellow and orange. Your photos won’t all match exactly to each other this way, but you will get a variation in the dress color.

As for your ivory dress, the problem is easier to solve. Just make sure that some photos are bounced and available light and after you’ve seen the proofs, tell your photog that you want your dress true color, if you have a swatch you can give them they have a better chance of matching it. It’s not that drastic of a color shift so the skin tones will be a little warmer but still ok. Also having pictures taken with available light will show up the beading detail on your gown, where as regular flash will just wash it out. Suggest a few shots taken at a window with just natural light coming in. The detail that comes in on the dress is awesome.

One more comment on color. This goes for guests also. It only seems to occur on woman dresses and not tuxes because I think the material on the dresses is thinner, but try to avoid wearing black. Flash very often goes right through the material to show the hint of underwear worn. So in other words you can see enough through to know if the person was wearing a half or full slip, or with out a slip the cut of the bra and underpants.