Blue-heavy aquarium LEDs are the main challenge. Camera sensors and auto white balance often struggle under narrow-spectrum lighting, so colors can look dull, tinted, or noisy even when they look vivid to your eyes.

Best approach:

• Shoot RAW, not JPEG, so you can correct white balance and color later.
• Make a reference shot under the same tank lighting using a gray card or, better, a color reference target. Then use that shot to set white balance or build a color profile in post.
• If your camera allows it, try a custom white balance from a neutral reference shot.
• In post-processing, apply that white balance/profile to the coral images.

A gray card will help; a full color target is more accurate.

Also, if the lighting is extremely blue, the blue channel may be overdriven while red/green are weak. In that case, RAW recovery may help, but there are limits: some LED spectra simply don’t give the sensor enough balanced color information. If correction still looks poor, the only real fix is more balanced lighting (or temporarily adding whiter light while photographing).