I’ve long felt that my phone camera makes sunlight too orange, especially at sunrise and sunset. Clouds that appear pink to me will show up as bright orange in the phone. Of course, that affects me when I go to paint the sunset, especially if I’ve forgotten what it actually looked like.
I tested my phone vs. my DSLR camera by taking photos with each of the same sunset. but
Here’s the phone photo.
Here’s the DSLR version. (The DSLR also has a zoom lens, so it’s more zoomed in.)
Totally different color palettes! The phone shows the clouds as blue-toned gray with orange streaks of light against a yellow-orange sky, while the DSLR shows the clouds as violet-toned gray with pink streaks of light against a pale caramel-colored sky.
Color-wise, the DSLR version is much more similar to my actual perception.
This is useful because it indicates that I should be taking my DSLR to photograph sunsets. But it also suggests concrete ways that I can adjust for phone color shift when I paint sunset photos and others. I couldn’t figure out a way to use photo editing to turn photo #1 into photo # 2 – that subtle background sky color is especially difficult to render if it’s not captured correctly – but keeping this in mind, I can try to adjust sunset colors to be pinker and softer when I paint them.
Experiment: Painting this sunset from a cell phone photo
I used another cell phone shot from that night as my primary reference to actually do a painting.
I zoomed in, and while keeping the colors bright, I also made them more pinky/violet and less orange/gray. The result is not quite like the DSLR version – it’s still brighter and more intense, less pastel – but I think I did a pretty good job of intuitively adjusting from the phone biases.
I also think I should give myself a break in future when I post the painting and the reference and realize the painting is way more different from the reference, color-wise, than I had realized while painting it. I think I am often intentionally (if subconsciously) fixing the colors and doing a good job!
Something I really like in this painting is the creamy pastel clouds at the top, an effect I achieved by mixing in white gouache. Something white gouache pastels are the way to go!