This post is part of my colour analysis theory series. This post was originally posted by me on Reddit.
On the surface, virtual colour draping seems ideal. You only need one or two photos, you can find colour palettes online, and all you have to do is to combine these two in your image editing software. It’s surely far easier and quicker than going through your entire home searching for garments, paper or even household items in colours that represent the seasonal colour palettes. However, there are some serious issues with virtual draping, and these issues often invalidate the results from your virtual “draping” altogether.
Can you find your best colours with a virtual draping? Sure, maybe, why not. To me, the drawbacks outweigh the positives, but you’ll have to decide for yourself.
Your camera lies
You’ve probably heard “the camera never lies”. Well, this is false, especially in terms of colour. Have you ever taken a photo of a beautiful red flower, only to be disappointed when seeing that the photo didn’t actually capture the beautiful colour you had seen in real life? Perhaps in your photo the red flower looks way brighter, or duller, or more pink, or more orange. Perhaps the red was captured beautifully, but in turn made the white flower next to it look greenish or yellow. This has to do with camera quality, yes, but also the white balance and colour balance. For your holiday photos this usually isn’t that important, but if you’re wanting the photos to represent your colouring as accurately as possible, then it’s a different story.
If you want to see some good examples of how much the lighting situation matters for how you look, check out this great blog post: https://blog.photofeeler.com/lighting/
This site contains some tips on ways to fix the white balance (using a white card is very efficient): https://www.digital-photo-secrets.com/tip/626/photos-too-blue-your-white-balance-might-be-to-blame/
You can also try to fix some of the automatic colour correction by standing further away from the camera and including more colours somewhere in the shot (maybe somewhere to the side of you where you can just crop it out in editing). You could try to use a colour wheel or something else with many different colours. This isn’t foolproof, but give it a go and see if it helps.
If you take a lot of photos of yourself wearing different colours (not digitally applied!), you’ll have to keep in mind that if your skin in a photo looks like you’re an extra at The Simpsons, that’s probably due to the camera and problems with the white and colour balance, not an actual effect of the colour on your skin. The camera can also make the drape you’re wearing look much more vibrant than it is in real life, and in turn make your colouring look duller in comparison. You can instead look at blotchiness and flattering vs unflatting shadows, but pay more attention to what you see happening in real life in front of the mirror as opposed through a screen and the camera lens.
So, even if you get the white and colour balance right, the quality of your camera is decent,etc, keep in mind that what you seen on your screen, may not be the same someone else sees on their screen. Screen calibration is important for a more accurate representation of colour (and so is screen quality). Have you ever ordered a dress online, only to find out that the colour doesn’t look as expected? If you have more than one device, try looking up one piece of clothing from a store like H&M, Target, Primark or whatever you prefer. Then, using a different device, look up the same exact item. Most likely, the colour won’t look exactly the same on both devices.
Surface harmony
Surface harmony is nice, but that’s not the biggest thing we would look for in a colour analysis (focusing too much on it can lead you astray). Surface harmony basically means that we’re trying to match or harmonise the colours to other colours there. If a colour appears to blend and harmonise with the client, but some brighter colours make her look more alive, more vibrant, healthier, most colour consultants would choose the brighter colours. Using virtual drapes, you will be able to judge surface harmony for the photo used, but you can’t see if a colour makes the facial contour look more defined, if unflattering shadows around the mouth or eyes appear, if the person suddenly looks like they turn the same colour as the drape, blothiness vs even skin, etc. The camera has already captured everything that was there when the photo was taken. You can only really see if something looks like it harmonises with the colours in the photo (whether the photo is of a woman or a ferris weel or an English landscape).
Using the same photo and a couple colour palettes, notice how the same palette looks like it harmonises more in one pic than the other? The photo used is the same, but the saturation and colour balance has been altered. So even if the photo you used appears to have more colour harmony with one set of colours, that doesn’t mean that would be true in real life if the photo is too desaturated, too bright or off in temperature. Very often a photo, especially if taken with a phone camera, will be too washed out or too grey.
Digital drapes are completely flat
If you are taking photos where you are using actual pieces of cloth or whatever it may be, the surface of the colour will not be flat (even if using paper as a drape). Light will bounce off it, there will be some shadows, the colour will not consist of one even colour (even if the scarf you’re wearing is a solid colour in real life). It will look like a part of the photo, and not something digitally put in there later (I’m some you’ve all seen photos of “Photoshop fails” where something very obviously is manipulated into a photo). Using the same photo as above, I’ve used the colour picker to make a virtual drape. Notice how flat it is in comparison? I also radically changed the same “drape” to show how the changes doesn’t really affect her skin. Surface harmony, again, is really the only thing that you can judge here. In real life, her skin wouldn’t look the same in these very different colours. These very flat colours will also make a colour look brighter than it would be in real life, and thus often make bright colours look excessively bright (and if you combine this with a photo that’s too desaturated, you might be fooled to think you only can do very muted colours, even if you might suit brighter colours in real life).
Digitally altering the colour of a garment
If you are wearing a bright red shirt, the way your skin “reacts” to the red shirt will remain constant even if you try to alter the colour of the shirt digitally. Perhaps the red shirt bounced red colour onto your chin (think about holding a buttercup under your chin as a child and how your chin turned yellow), and this won’t magically go away simply bu changing the red shirt in Photoshop.
Basically, digitally changing the colour of what you’re wearing in a photo as a way of representing different seasonal drapes won’t do much – the effects (good or bad) caused by the drape you wore in real life when you took the photo will still be there (thus causing confusion as you might think “…but I look good/bad in every season!”).
The only changes you can see by digitally changing colours, is changes in surface harmony; i.e. how the coloured pixles look next to each other. You’re not seeing the actual effects of one coloured fabric next to real skin.
…but some colour consultants offer virtual analysis!
Some colour consultants like doing virtual analysis. Some will judge you based on the colour of your hair, skin and eyes, others will do the “virtual draping”, others want you to send photos in certain colours, others will send you mini drapes (colour swatches) in the mail and ask you to take photos of yourself with those (out of these ways of doing virtual analysis, IMO the latter is the best alternative as you’re removing some of the extraneous variables). Many, if not most, of them have guidelines on how you should take your photos. If the consultant has done training and worked with clients in real life before, they’ll also have more knowledge on what to look for compared to someone who hasn’t done any training and that has only worked online. This post was made for informational purposes, not to knock the work of other colour consultants. Many people are not aware of the limitations of photos. For some people, online colour analysis works, and that’s great. For others, it doesn’t. I don’t like or do virtual analysis due to the reasons listed above + the client won’t be able to see the changes as you flip from one drape to the next in RL and thus lose out of the learning experience. However, it’s up to you to decide what you want to do. If the end result is good and accurate, then that’s really the only thing that matters.