green background helped me to get true color of flowers
 

Hello,
I have purchased two new phals yesterday - purple and yellow. I spent whole day today trying to make good pictures of them, but had trouble with getting true color of flowers.
I experimented with different backgrounds, lights etc. with no luck.
At the end I put them in front of my big old ponytail palm and that was it - they started to come up with right color under any light.
I have attached the pictures resized to 30% of actual size.
What do you think?

They do look very natural. I wonder if the presence of green foliage in the background simply helps our eyes calibrate to an instinctively recognized color and percieve other colors correctly relative to that.

I think that the automatic color balance on your camera may require components of each color in order to balance properly.
You might try a little experiment- photograph a uniform object like a piece of colored construction paper in each of the 3 "RGB" colors, red, green and blue, and see if the color isn't thrown off by having only one color hitting the sensors. Sometimes a camera needs to be fooled.
Now that I think of it, I'm going to try that little experiment myself!

The flowers are gorgeous by the way!

If you used auto-white balance, then the green may also have helped. Green is the predominant color in human vision, and also predominates on the CCD chip. The Bayer pattern consists of two green diodes, one red sensitive, one blue sensitive one.

You can also do a custom white balance, and get reliably the colors as they are.

Your pictures came out very nice.....beautiful phals too!
Joann

I too think it is the auto-white balance. Connie, I will be interested to hear how the experiment goes.

Lovely flowers by the way and appear very natural looking.