lime green looking way too flat

[Stuart Andrews]

hey team. we are shooting product shots for arcteryx and one of their lime green jackets is looking waaay to bland. the blue first layer looks in the monitor as it does in real life but the green is nowhere near as vibrant. it's more than the monitors and we black balanced the camera right before the shoot with a lens cap on the lens.

thoughts?

are the lights playing off the product and with the sensor?

 

[Michael Winokur]

Stuart - A lot of times photographing new clothing you have to do post color correction to get it to match the way the color is supposed to look. They actually put the garments in a daylight balanced light box next to the retoucher's work station so they can match the image to the garment. My understanding is the fabrics are treated with UV protective chemicals which alter the way certain colors photograph. See if you can't find a color swatch, let's say in a pantone book that matches that color in the clothing and see if that can be captured accurately with your camera and lighting setup. If you are able to reproduce that hue of green then the problem may be in the garment.

 

[Andy White]

Have you dropped it into RCX and looked at it there?

 

[Stuart Andrews]

we have played with it in RCX and can get it back but still one colour is correct and the other is way off. weird.

and thanks for that explanation Michael

 

[Les Dittert]

Florescent colors like safety green are not photography friendly because of the nature of how the object 'reflects' the light. This is because florescent dyes will absorb one color ( including UV) and re emit it at another wavelength, such as green . It's the same trouble as trying to take photos of a black light poster.
You just have to color correct it to super saturate the color to at least get it closer.

 

[Robert Ruffo New]

Advanced grading with secondaries (not RCX) is your friend. We sue a sample of the garment under a Kino next to the monitor.

 

[Robert Hart]

There has previously been discussion on the colour green and the effect of IR contamination upon some sensors. If you are lighting with tungsten, there may be a fairly strong infra-red light coming out as well. It might be worthwhile trying a IR-750 filter to see if that fixes things.

 

[Timur Civan]

You need a davinci or other secondaries station when shooting product. My DIT uses scratch. Works great.

 

[Paul Watt]

I shot the piece, and I think it'll definitely come down to using davinci for colour accuracy. It's interesting to note that every colour was very bang on except for a few blue/green colours, where everything trended to blue, quite heavily. This was independent of what type of lights we used, white and black balancing, and IR problems, since it happened with every type of light source we could throw at the clothes from real daylight to LED to tungsten to fluorescent. It only happened with very certain fabrics, though, so it'll be easy to fix those pieces. It's a bit curious to see it happening with only 3 very specific colours out of 40 or so pieces we shot, and to have those colours so far off while everything else looked pretty much perfect right away. Always with blue/green fabrics trending to blue while every other colour was spot on, and skin tones looked pretty natural.