How can I photograph fluorescent clothing so the color doesn’t look washed out?

Asked 9/2/2014

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I’m trying to photograph fluorescent or “day-glo” clothing. It has no reflective strips, but in photos the color looks washed out and not as vivid as it appears in person. How can I capture it more accurately?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

11y ago

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Photographing fluorescent (day-glo) colours is difficult because they are much brighter than they should be. They are actually light sources in the visible spectrum (they absorb invisible ultraviolet light, then re-emit the energy as visible light). It's not that they aren't bright enough, but that they're too bright, and if everything else in the image is exposed properly, they will be overexposed. Even if you dial back the exposure a bit, there is a good chance that at least one colour channel will be blown out, since the fluorescent emissions are at very specific wavelengths. (This is quite different from ordinary dyes, which re-emit over a rather broad spectrum and essentially turn all of the light that isn't the right colour into waste heat.)

You can try a few things, most of which won't be entirely satisfactory. The first is to underexpose as much as you dare to bring the fluorescent colours back into a usable range, then try to raise the rest of the colours to match. That will probably result in an unacceptably noisy image. Conversely, you can try to selectively bring the fluorescent colour down in post, but given that one or two channels will likely be blown (fully saturated), you will probably wind up with significantly less detail than you were hoping to find -- but with just the right colour and careful post-processing, you may be able to grab enough luminance information from an un-blown channel to arrive at a realistic rendering.

Both of those assume "action" shots -- real-life people who are wearing the clothing. In studio, as product shots, there's another option. That's to take two photographs. One should use a light source that has little to no UV (or near-UV) content -- filtered flash or tungsten will do the trick. (Fluorescent lights usually have too much UV content for this exposure.) That will give you the shape, drape and texture you need. The second exposure will use a high-UV source (unfiltered flash, fluorescent or "black" light), exposed to get the tone at or just above a middle value. That exposure will give you the garish colour, and not much else. You can then blend the two exposures using any layer-capable image editor. (You can also try colourizing a single non-UV exposure, but it's hard to get made-up colours right.)

Originally by user28116. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user28116

11y ago

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Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

Fluorescent fabrics are hard to photograph accurately because they can act like visible light sources: they absorb ultraviolet light and re-emit it as very bright visible color. That can cause overexposure or a blown color channel even when the rest of the image looks correctly exposed, which makes the fabric look washed out.

You usually can’t reproduce the full effect perfectly with a normal camera and monitor, because part of what makes the fabric look so vivid is UV-related and standard displays only show visible light.

What you can do:

  • Lower exposure slightly and watch for clipped color channels.
  • Add controlled lighting so you can better manage the scene exposure.
  • Expect to refine the look in post-processing, often with selective color and possibly a subtle glow effect.

In short: the issue is usually that the fluorescent color is too intense for normal capture/display, not that your camera is failing to see enough of it.

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11y ago

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