Colour correction
What is colour correction?
Colour correction is the work of bringing the colour in a photograph to the colour of the real product. It covers white balance, exposure and the removal of any cast the lighting left, followed by a check against a physical sample on a calibrated screen. The aim is not a prettier frame but one a customer can order from without sending the parcel back. A whole series is treated the same way.
Example
A home textiles shop takes 600 orders a month at an average of €45. Returns run at 12%, which is 72 orders, and roughly a third of them come back because the colour was not what the photograph showed: 24 orders. Handling one return costs the shop about €6 in courier, repacking and time — €144 a month, before the lost margin.
The photographs then go through colour correction against the physical samples: white balance set from a grey card, the fabric checked against the real thing on a calibrated screen, the whole series treated the same way. Colour returns fall to 8 a month. The €96 saved is the smaller half of the gain; the larger half is that the customer gets what they saw. The figures are illustrative.
Why it matters for a business
Colour drifts for reasons nobody notices while shooting: warm room lighting, a bounce off a coloured wall, the camera’s automatic white balance, a second batch shot on a different day. The result is a series where the same grey reads blue in one frame and beige in the next.
Correction runs in a fixed order:
- White balance from a neutral reference in the frame, not by eye.
- Exposure and contrast set to the real density of the material.
- The cast the lighting left on the white background removed.
- A check against the physical sample, close enough that the eye stops seeing a difference.
- The same treatment across the whole series, so neighbouring items agree in a listing.
Correction is not grading. Grading builds a mood; correction establishes a match, and in a shop that pays for returns it belongs to logistics rather than to aesthetics.
How to improve it
- Shoot a grey card or a colour target as the first frame of every series.
- Keep the lighting identical across every batch of the same item.
- Send a physical sample to whoever edits the files when the colour is critical.
- Review approved frames on a calibrated screen, not on a phone.
- Record which version was approved, so the next batch is matched to it.
Matching to samples and treating a series consistently is part of our photo retouching work.