Achieving optimal colour

There's a few things you should always check first when trying to achieve perfect colour:

1. Check your lighting

The lighting conditions under which the backdrop is viewed and photographed will have a strong effect on the colour you see. We optimise our backdrops to a D50 industry standard illuminant, which means they look closest to their intended state under neutral white light (5000K). If you're shooting using daylight for example (~6500k+), you may find the backdrops look cooler. You can therefore warm up or cool down certain shades very easily by adjusting your lighting temperature.

2. Use a grey card to optimise your white balance

This becomes particularly important if you cannot easily control your lighting as suggested above. We have a full guide to White Balance here. 

3. Mitigate glare to retain saturation

Darker backdrops and colours are always a little trickier to work with as they naturally reflect more light. In these situations you can use diffused or bounced light to help reduce loss of saturation caused by glare. We provide a suggested approach in our post about dark product & food photography here.

4. Calibrate your screen

For professional photographers looking for best possible colour consistency, you can choose to calibrate your monitor to an industry standard using a colour calibrator device like this one.

5. Perfect it in post

Alternatively, most minor colour variances can be easily adjusted in post-production. Lightroom, Photoshop, Capture One and Snapseed all have simple colour adjustment controls to achieve this.

6. Order duplicates at the same time

Please note that even with strict colour control, prints purchased at different times or on different materials may vary up to 5%. It's a bit like wallpaper batches - batches purchased at different times may not match up, simply because print is subject to so many different variables. Colours printed on different materials (e.g. on canvas vs vinyl) may also be subject to subtle variation. So if you want multiple versions of one design for use in the same scene, we recommend purchasing them at the same time and on the same material to ensure a perfect colour match.