Phone camera - colours of plants not accurate

I thought it was just Lumix cameras that suffered the blue/purple problem. Iris siberica never looks right through a DMC-TZ18. And the same picture even on a decent laptop with a professional-grade monitor is no better.

Is that what’s wrong with my Xanthomendoza observation? The first picture is close to the true colors, but each successive zoom in looks progressively greener instead of the true yellow?

You have different hue and temperature points for each photo.

what marina said, that’s your camera doing some auto tone adjusting. When it was zoomed out, there is more light so it has to brighten the image to get the main bit to show up that is in shadow. As you zoomed, it adjusted darker, and so the saturated colors really blew up. That one is camera setting that is shifted towards saturation (like most people want these days in photos).

I was talking about how they were seeing the right color on one screen, but their phone showed it purple-y instead. The night shift on cameras is a yellow/orange so it will do that. But that isn’t saved in the photo file, that is how the screen shifts in how it displays, so a different thing.

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That’s because I tried to fix them. The zoom-ins were even greener before I tried that. The zoom-out is the real colors.

it looks like a Samsung S10+ has multiple cameras. you may want to check if the main camera and the zoom camera have different settings for some reason. if i interpret the colors on the zoomed-in photos using HSL and bump down the S(aturation), i get colors that are similar to the zoomed-out photo. so that says to me that maybe the zoomed-in cameras are using some sort of “Vivid” color mode.

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Thanks. If I can fix them, I will replace the funky ones with the good ones.

Someone posted an herbarium sheet that was digitized with a standard color palette. I carry something similar, a cool ruler, for times when I want to get the color right. Nevada Native Plant Society sells these nice rulers. https://nvnps.org/_catalog I originally found them via another old iNat forum post.

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That picture looks ok for Dianella flowers. Cameras don’t always record the same colour hue as what we saw when we are doing the observations. My phone camera is lacking dynamic range. Some pictures are missing the blue colour in the sky. Some pictures are ok with the blue sky pictures when I deliberately focus on the subject with blue sky present. There is some compensation involved, as when the camera can pick up the blue colour sky, some other factors will be lowered or increased. Red colour flowers are especially difficult to get the correct hue. Flowers and butterfly wings, beetle exoskeletons have surfaces with diffraction gratings. Colours tend to shift when viewed from different angles. Like a shift from blue to green metallic colours. Cameras might have recorded colours differently and sometimes processes the image excessively using some complex algorithms built in a chip processor. or the colour pixels are averaged… Anyway, conventional macro technique is not to use flash. I thought point and shoot cameras used to disable flash when set to macro mode. But the picture have to be taken in a fairly bright environment. Now it seems to me photographers do use flash in macro photography, some kind of diffused flash. Pictures are best with natural light. and camera manufacturers can have different products. Some are better than others in capturing the correct colours. I can accept some compromise with my device.

Even the best cameras may take photos that look different from what you are seeing. The sensor is not the same as a retina. This can vary with the light at different times of the day – more blue in the evening, pinker at sunrise/sunset, etc. It’s ok to use color adjustment so that it looks “as shot” rather than as the camera has recorded it. First thing with a blue that looks purple, is go to edit mode on this photo and fix the light balance – move the tint slider from red to green. It may just take a small adjustment to correct this. If your phone allows, you can edit colors or do more, but the tint (red-green) and/or warmth (yellow-blue) adjustments may take care of it.

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Maybe the colors in real life are inaccurate. :-)

Blue/violet in flowers is a special case. Flowers often reflect UV light which is seen by many pollinators (as guides to nectar) and some cameras but not by us. Cameras usually have a UV filter so that photos appear closer to what is seen by the human eye. But the filters may differ in characteristics and some cameras don’t even have such a filter - then the extra UV light is captured and interpreted as what is closest to UV in the visible spectrum - namely violet.

So blue-violet shifts in photos, especially of flowers, are quite common. There’s even this specialized ultraviolet photography that aims to capture the UV patterns in flowers for example which may be quite different from those seen by the human eye.

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