Getting flower colour right

Florists are held to colour more tightly than almost any other trade. A client chooses a palette, often months in advance, sometimes matched to fabric, and expects what arrives to be that palette.

Photographs sit in the middle of this relationship twice: as the portfolio that sold the work, and as the record of what was delivered. Both need to be accurate.

Some colours are much harder than others

Dusty and blush pinks shift toward peach or salmon under warm light, and toward grey under cool light. They are the most commonly misrepresented colour in the trade.

Deep reds lose all detail and become a flat dark shape when overexposed, and turn brown under fluorescent light.

Purples and blues are notoriously badly rendered by camera sensors and often photograph as blue when they are violet, or pink when they are lilac.

Whites and creams pick up whatever cast is in the room, which is how cream becomes yellow and white becomes blue.

Knowing which of these are in an arrangement tells you how carefully to work.

Set white balance manually and verify against something known

The single most effective habit is to include a white reference — a piece of white card, a white ribbon, a sheet of paper — in the first frame of a session, then check it on screen.

If the card is not white, adjust and reshoot. Everything else in the frame is then correct too.

Automatic white balance in a room full of colour is particularly unreliable, because the camera reads a mass of pink as a cast to be corrected and shifts everything green.

Photograph in one light, not several

Mixed lighting — a window plus a fluorescent tube, or a warm lamp plus a cool one — cannot be corrected globally. One part of the arrangement will be right and another will not.

Turn off everything except your one light. This is the difference between a colour you can correct and one you cannot.

Watch exposure on dark and pale flowers

Deep red and burgundy blooms need slight underexposure to retain petal detail. Photographed at automatic exposure they become flat shapes with no texture.

White and pale flowers need the opposite care: overexposed, they lose the subtle shadow that gives petals form, and a white rose becomes a white blob.

If an arrangement contains both, expose for the highlights, keep the whites just below clipping, and accept that the darks will be dark.

Check on more than one screen

Screens vary enormously. An arrangement that looks correct on your phone may look markedly different on a client's laptop.

Look at your photographs on at least two devices before sending them. Anything that shifts noticeably between them is a photograph that will cause a conversation.

Say what the colour is, in words

Photographs are evidence but they are not a specification. Alongside images, name the varieties and the colours in text.

A client who reads "dusty pink garden roses, cream lisianthus, sage eucalyptus" alongside a photograph has two sources of information that agree. A client with only a photograph has one that might be wrong on their screen.

What staging preserves and what it does not

The blooms, their colour as photographed and the arrangement's shape are preserved when the photograph is restaged, because it is your arrangement being placed in a new setting rather than a new arrangement being generated.

The scene changes the surroundings and the light in the scene, which means it can lift a workroom photograph considerably. What it cannot do is recover a blush that was already recorded as peach. Get the white balance right in the workroom, and everything downstream stays true.