I
Isabel Blanco
Guest
- Thread Author
- #1
When a customer buys a product online, the color they see on screen becomes part of what they expect to receive.
30,000 sales and marketing pros get our insights, tips, and best practices delivered weekly.
If a shopper orders what appears to be a deep burgundy dress but opens the package to find something considerably brighter or redder, the product itself may be perfectly manufactured. The problem is that it doesn’t look like the product they thought they were buying.
That’s particularly important in ecommerce because customers can’t pick up a product, examine its material under different lighting or compare two colors side by side. They have to rely on your product imagery.
And research suggests those images are one of the first places shoppers look. During Baymard Institute’s large-scale product-page usability testing, 56% of users’ first actions after reaching a product page were to explore the product images. Baymard also observed product abandonment when imagery wasn’t good enough for shoppers to properly evaluate an item.
For products where color influences the buying decision, that puts considerable responsibility on the image, and makes accurate color reproduction particularly important.
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
So how accurate does product color need to be? What happens when different images show different versions of the same color? And what can ecommerce brands do to create more reliable product imagery?
Let’s look at what the research tells us.
In a physical store, customers have access to the product itself.
Online, the photograph becomes one of their primary ways of assessing it.
Product imagery helps shoppers evaluate shape, scale, texture, details and, of course, color. Adobe describes ecommerce product photography as helping customers understand what they’re purchasing, while Baymard’s research shows just how heavily shoppers rely on imagery during product evaluation.
Color accuracy is about setting an appropriate expectation. The closer your imagery comes to faithfully representing the physical product, the better equipped the customer is to decide whether that product is right for them.
And sometimes even a relatively small visual discrepancy can introduce doubt.
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
Baymard observed exactly this during usability testing of furniture retailer CB2.
A participant looking at a sofa noticed that its fabric color appeared substantially different in CB2’s augmented-reality view compared with the standard product photography.
IMAGE SOURCE
Rather than helping her understand the product, the discrepancy made her question which representation she could trust.
She then went looking through customer-submitted photographs for a third visual reference to determine what the sofa’s color was actually likely to look like. Baymard found that when shoppers couldn’t reconcile discrepancies between different visual representations, some ultimately abandoned the site or postponed the purchase until they could evaluate the product another way.
That’s a useful lesson for ecommerce brands.
One of the difficulties with representing color online is that color doesn’t exist independently of the product.
Material matters. So do texture, surface finish, lighting, highlights and shadows.
A burgundy cotton T-shirt may appear relatively flat and matte. The same approximate color on velvet can contain much deeper shadows and brighter highlights. Apply it to a glossy leather handbag and reflected light changes its appearance again.
This is why accurate product color editing isn’t simply a case of selecting an area and replacing one RGB or hex value with another.
The color still has to behave naturally on the product.
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
Color matters across ecommerce, but there are categories where subtle differences can have a particularly significant effect on the customer’s decision.
Cream, ivory, stone and beige might all occupy a similar part of the color spectrum, but they’re not interchangeable to a shopper trying to coordinate a garment with something they already own.
The same applies to different denim washes, subtle neutrals and fashion colorways. The product image needs to communicate those distinctions as clearly as reasonably possible.
IMAGE SOURCE
A sofa, chair or rug doesn’t exist in isolation. Customers may be trying to coordinate it with their walls, flooring, curtains or existing furniture. A warm beige and a cool grey-beige might produce very different results in the same room.
This makes accurate, consistent imagery particularly useful for products where color needs to work with an existing environment.
IMAGE SOURCE
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
Beauty provides perhaps the clearest illustration of why a simple digital color swatch isn’t always enough.
Baymard observed shoppers comparing cosmetic swatches with images of products being worn because factors including opacity, finish and skin tone affect how a shade actually appears.
In one Sephora test, a participant was surprised by how much darker a lipstick appeared in a swatch compared with the model image. Other participants specifically wanted to see individual shades worn by models rather than relying solely on swatches.
IMAGE SOURCE
More recent Baymard health-and-beauty research found the same underlying behaviour. Shoppers sought swatches and model imagery across different complexions to judge products they couldn’t physically try.
In one Sephora example, a participant abandoned a blush because the available model imagery didn’t give her enough confidence to assess how the shade would look on her own skin tone.
IMAGE SOURCE
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
Returns are an unavoidable part of ecommerce. Products can be returned because they don’t fit, arrive damaged, aren’t suitable or simply aren’t what the customer expected. Color can form part of that expectation.
“Video is rapidly growing.” -Brandon Chopp, digital manager, iHeartRaves
QUOTE: Product imagery contributes to the customer’s expectation of what they’re buying.
If the delivered item’s appearance differs materially from the imagery that informed the purchase, the customer has another potential reason to be disappointed with what arrives.
That’s why the objective of color-accurate ecommerce photography shouldn’t be to make a product look as appealing as technically possible.
It should be to make it look as faithful to the real product as reasonably possible.
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
Photoshop can’t compensate for every problem created during a photoshoot.
The process of producing reliable color begins when the image is captured.
Lighting can introduce unwanted color casts. Incorrect white balance can make an image appear warmer or cooler than the actual product. Reflections can affect glossy materials, while surrounding colors can influence highly reflective surfaces.
Adobe recommends establishing a neutral white balance for product photography to avoid unwanted blue, yellow or amber color casts. Its current ecommerce photography guidance also emphasises consistent colour and using post-production to correct lighting or colour inconsistencies.
A controlled workflow might therefore include:
The better the source photography, the stronger the starting point for accurate post-production.
There’s little value in carefully correcting a product’s color if the monitor you’re using to make those decisions isn’t displaying it reliably.
Adobe explains that color profiles describe how devices reproduce color and allow software such as Photoshop to manage differences between cameras, monitors and other devices. It identifies an accurate monitor profile as fundamental to making reliable color decisions. Monitor calibration is therefore an important part of a professional color workflow.
It doesn’t mean every customer will subsequently see precisely the same thing – we’ll come to that shortly – but it gives the person editing the image a more reliable reference point.
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but they solve different ecommerce problems.
The physical product is burgundy.
The master product photographed is burgundy.
The distinction is important because the objective is different. One restores the color that should already be there. The other creates an accurate representation of another genuine product option.
Product editing inevitably involves making visual decisions.
Brightness might be adjusted. Backgrounds may be cleaned up. Dust, scratches or photographic imperfections may be removed.
But there is a line between improving the photograph and misrepresenting the product.
Suppose an olive-green jacket looks relatively muted in real life.
Increasing saturation might make the jacket stand out more dramatically on an ecommerce listing. But if the edited version starts to resemble a much richer emerald or forest green, the image is no longer setting the same expectation as the physical product.
The same principle applies when creating a new color variant.
Texture, stitching, highlights and shadows shouldn’t disappear simply because the base color has changed.
The goal is to create the most useful and faithful representation of the product, and this is where professional judgement is crucial.
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
No – and that’s an important limitation to acknowledge.
Even when the original product photograph has been captured, edited and exported carefully, retailers can’t completely control how it appears once it reaches the customer.
Screens reproduce color differently.
Brightness settings vary.
Some customers use calibrated monitors; others use older phones.
Viewing conditions also change. An image viewed on a bright screen outdoors may appear different from the same image viewed on a dim display in a dark room.
Color spaces introduce another variable. Adobe notes that different devices operate within different color spaces and therefore don’t necessarily reproduce identical ranges of colors. Color-management systems and profiles help reconcile those differences, but they can’t make every possible display behave identically.
So absolute screen-to-real-life perfection isn’t a realistic promise.
The objective is to control the variables that can be controlled and create a reliable source image from which the customer’s device then renders the product.
There isn’t one setting or Photoshop adjustment that guarantees accurate color. It requires a consistent workflow from photography through to final ecommerce output.
There’s no way to guarantee that every shopper will see precisely the same color on every device.
And not every ecommerce return involving a customer’s expectations can be prevented through photography.
But brands can control the quality and accuracy of the product imagery they publish.
When customers can’t physically examine an item before buying it, those images help form their understanding of what they’re going to receive.
That makes accurate product color less about making an image technically perfect and more about giving customers a reliable visual representation on which to base their decision.
The question to ask isn’t:
How good can we make this product look?
It’s:
Does this image accurately represent the product we’re asking the customer to buy?
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
Even carefully photographed products can require color adjustments before they’re ready for ecommerce.
And when an otherwise identical product is available in several colors, photographing every version isn’t always necessary.
Path’s professional color change services can create additional product color variants from a master image while retaining important details such as texture, lighting, highlights and shadows.
Where the objective is to correct an existing product color rather than create a new variant, professional post-production can also help bring the image closer to the approved reference.
Wish you could just hand this over to a pro? Surprise, you can.
Learn more
Product imagery helps customers understand what they’re buying before they can physically inspect it. Accurate color helps those images set a more reliable expectation of the product’s appearance.
It can aim to represent the product very closely, but exact reproduction on every customer’s screen isn’t possible. Displays, brightness settings, color profiles and viewing conditions can all influence how a color appears.
Different screens reproduce color differently and operate within different color spaces and profiles. Display calibration, brightness and environmental lighting can also affect how an image appears.
Color correction adjusts an image so the photographed product’s existing color is represented more faithfully. Color change intentionally creates another color version of the product, usually to represent an additional product variant.
Start with controlled lighting and correct white balance, use an appropriate color-management workflow, edit on a calibrated display and compare final imagery against the physical product or an approved reference wherever possible.
Yes, when the underlying product is otherwise identical and only its color changes. A professionally edited master image can be used to create additional variants while retaining texture, lighting, shadows and highlights. If the actual product also changes in material, pattern, construction or other physical details, photographing the real variant is more appropriate.
The post Why Product Color Accuracy Matters in Ecommerce: Customer Expectations, Trust and Returns appeared first on Path Edits.
30,000 sales and marketing pros get our insights, tips, and best practices delivered weekly.
If a shopper orders what appears to be a deep burgundy dress but opens the package to find something considerably brighter or redder, the product itself may be perfectly manufactured. The problem is that it doesn’t look like the product they thought they were buying.
That’s particularly important in ecommerce because customers can’t pick up a product, examine its material under different lighting or compare two colors side by side. They have to rely on your product imagery.
And research suggests those images are one of the first places shoppers look. During Baymard Institute’s large-scale product-page usability testing, 56% of users’ first actions after reaching a product page were to explore the product images. Baymard also observed product abandonment when imagery wasn’t good enough for shoppers to properly evaluate an item.
For products where color influences the buying decision, that puts considerable responsibility on the image, and makes accurate color reproduction particularly important.
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
So how accurate does product color need to be? What happens when different images show different versions of the same color? And what can ecommerce brands do to create more reliable product imagery?
Let’s look at what the research tells us.
Why is product color accuracy important in ecommerce?
In a physical store, customers have access to the product itself.
Online, the photograph becomes one of their primary ways of assessing it.
Product imagery helps shoppers evaluate shape, scale, texture, details and, of course, color. Adobe describes ecommerce product photography as helping customers understand what they’re purchasing, while Baymard’s research shows just how heavily shoppers rely on imagery during product evaluation.
Color accuracy is about setting an appropriate expectation. The closer your imagery comes to faithfully representing the physical product, the better equipped the customer is to decide whether that product is right for them.
And sometimes even a relatively small visual discrepancy can introduce doubt.
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
1. When product colors don’t match, shoppers can lose confidence
Baymard observed exactly this during usability testing of furniture retailer CB2.
A participant looking at a sofa noticed that its fabric color appeared substantially different in CB2’s augmented-reality view compared with the standard product photography.
IMAGE SOURCE
Rather than helping her understand the product, the discrepancy made her question which representation she could trust.
She then went looking through customer-submitted photographs for a third visual reference to determine what the sofa’s color was actually likely to look like. Baymard found that when shoppers couldn’t reconcile discrepancies between different visual representations, some ultimately abandoned the site or postponed the purchase until they could evaluate the product another way.
That’s a useful lesson for ecommerce brands.
2. Color isn’t just a hex code
One of the difficulties with representing color online is that color doesn’t exist independently of the product.
Material matters. So do texture, surface finish, lighting, highlights and shadows.
A burgundy cotton T-shirt may appear relatively flat and matte. The same approximate color on velvet can contain much deeper shadows and brighter highlights. Apply it to a glossy leather handbag and reflected light changes its appearance again.
This is why accurate product color editing isn’t simply a case of selecting an area and replacing one RGB or hex value with another.
The color still has to behave naturally on the product.
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
3. Some ecommerce products are particularly color-sensitive
Color matters across ecommerce, but there are categories where subtle differences can have a particularly significant effect on the customer’s decision.
Fashion and apparel
Cream, ivory, stone and beige might all occupy a similar part of the color spectrum, but they’re not interchangeable to a shopper trying to coordinate a garment with something they already own.
The same applies to different denim washes, subtle neutrals and fashion colorways. The product image needs to communicate those distinctions as clearly as reasonably possible.
IMAGE SOURCE
Furniture and interiors
A sofa, chair or rug doesn’t exist in isolation. Customers may be trying to coordinate it with their walls, flooring, curtains or existing furniture. A warm beige and a cool grey-beige might produce very different results in the same room.
This makes accurate, consistent imagery particularly useful for products where color needs to work with an existing environment.
IMAGE SOURCE
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
Cosmetics
Beauty provides perhaps the clearest illustration of why a simple digital color swatch isn’t always enough.
Baymard observed shoppers comparing cosmetic swatches with images of products being worn because factors including opacity, finish and skin tone affect how a shade actually appears.
In one Sephora test, a participant was surprised by how much darker a lipstick appeared in a swatch compared with the model image. Other participants specifically wanted to see individual shades worn by models rather than relying solely on swatches.
IMAGE SOURCE
More recent Baymard health-and-beauty research found the same underlying behaviour. Shoppers sought swatches and model imagery across different complexions to judge products they couldn’t physically try.
In one Sephora example, a participant abandoned a blush because the available model imagery didn’t give her enough confidence to assess how the shade would look on her own skin tone.
IMAGE SOURCE
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
4. The gap between “what I saw” and “what arrived” matters
Returns are an unavoidable part of ecommerce. Products can be returned because they don’t fit, arrive damaged, aren’t suitable or simply aren’t what the customer expected. Color can form part of that expectation.
“Video is rapidly growing.” -Brandon Chopp, digital manager, iHeartRaves
QUOTE: Product imagery contributes to the customer’s expectation of what they’re buying.
If the delivered item’s appearance differs materially from the imagery that informed the purchase, the customer has another potential reason to be disappointed with what arrives.
That’s why the objective of color-accurate ecommerce photography shouldn’t be to make a product look as appealing as technically possible.
It should be to make it look as faithful to the real product as reasonably possible.
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
5. Product color accuracy starts before editing
Photoshop can’t compensate for every problem created during a photoshoot.
The process of producing reliable color begins when the image is captured.
Lighting can introduce unwanted color casts. Incorrect white balance can make an image appear warmer or cooler than the actual product. Reflections can affect glossy materials, while surrounding colors can influence highly reflective surfaces.
Adobe recommends establishing a neutral white balance for product photography to avoid unwanted blue, yellow or amber color casts. Its current ecommerce photography guidance also emphasises consistent colour and using post-production to correct lighting or colour inconsistencies.
A controlled workflow might therefore include:
- Consistent lighting conditions
- Correct white balance
- Appropriate camera settings
- A neutral or controlled shooting environment
- Color reference tools where required
- A calibrated editing monitor
- Comparison against the physical product or an approved reference
The better the source photography, the stronger the starting point for accurate post-production.
6. Your editing monitor matters too
There’s little value in carefully correcting a product’s color if the monitor you’re using to make those decisions isn’t displaying it reliably.
Adobe explains that color profiles describe how devices reproduce color and allow software such as Photoshop to manage differences between cameras, monitors and other devices. It identifies an accurate monitor profile as fundamental to making reliable color decisions. Monitor calibration is therefore an important part of a professional color workflow.
It doesn’t mean every customer will subsequently see precisely the same thing – we’ll come to that shortly – but it gives the person editing the image a more reliable reference point.
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
7. Color correction and color change solve different problems
The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but they solve different ecommerce problems.
Color correction
The physical product is burgundy.
- Problem: The photograph makes it appear too red because of the lighting or capture conditions.
- Solution: Color correction adjusts the photograph so it represents the original burgundy product more faithfully.
Color change
The master product photographed is burgundy.
- Problem: The same product is also manufactured in navy, but a separate photograph of the navy version isn’t available.
- Solution: Color change editing creates the navy variant while retaining the original product’s shape, texture, lighting, shadows and other relevant details.
The distinction is important because the objective is different. One restores the color that should already be there. The other creates an accurate representation of another genuine product option.
8. Accurate doesn’t mean artificially perfect
Product editing inevitably involves making visual decisions.
Brightness might be adjusted. Backgrounds may be cleaned up. Dust, scratches or photographic imperfections may be removed.
But there is a line between improving the photograph and misrepresenting the product.
Suppose an olive-green jacket looks relatively muted in real life.
Increasing saturation might make the jacket stand out more dramatically on an ecommerce listing. But if the edited version starts to resemble a much richer emerald or forest green, the image is no longer setting the same expectation as the physical product.
The same principle applies when creating a new color variant.
Texture, stitching, highlights and shadows shouldn’t disappear simply because the base color has changed.
The goal is to create the most useful and faithful representation of the product, and this is where professional judgement is crucial.
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
9. Can an ecommerce image ever show exactly the same color to everyone?
No – and that’s an important limitation to acknowledge.
Even when the original product photograph has been captured, edited and exported carefully, retailers can’t completely control how it appears once it reaches the customer.
Screens reproduce color differently.
Brightness settings vary.
Some customers use calibrated monitors; others use older phones.
Viewing conditions also change. An image viewed on a bright screen outdoors may appear different from the same image viewed on a dim display in a dark room.
Color spaces introduce another variable. Adobe notes that different devices operate within different color spaces and therefore don’t necessarily reproduce identical ranges of colors. Color-management systems and profiles help reconcile those differences, but they can’t make every possible display behave identically.
So absolute screen-to-real-life perfection isn’t a realistic promise.
The objective is to control the variables that can be controlled and create a reliable source image from which the customer’s device then renders the product.
10. How can ecommerce brands improve product color accuracy?
There isn’t one setting or Photoshop adjustment that guarantees accurate color. It requires a consistent workflow from photography through to final ecommerce output.
Product color accuracy is ultimately about expectation
There’s no way to guarantee that every shopper will see precisely the same color on every device.
And not every ecommerce return involving a customer’s expectations can be prevented through photography.
But brands can control the quality and accuracy of the product imagery they publish.
When customers can’t physically examine an item before buying it, those images help form their understanding of what they’re going to receive.
That makes accurate product color less about making an image technically perfect and more about giving customers a reliable visual representation on which to base their decision.
The question to ask isn’t:
How good can we make this product look?
It’s:
Does this image accurately represent the product we’re asking the customer to buy?
Get completely natural color changes, done by pro designers for 99c per image
Learn more
Getting product colors right in post-production
Even carefully photographed products can require color adjustments before they’re ready for ecommerce.
And when an otherwise identical product is available in several colors, photographing every version isn’t always necessary.
Path’s professional color change services can create additional product color variants from a master image while retaining important details such as texture, lighting, highlights and shadows.
Where the objective is to correct an existing product color rather than create a new variant, professional post-production can also help bring the image closer to the approved reference.
Wish you could just hand this over to a pro? Surprise, you can.
Learn more
FAQs
Why is color accuracy important in ecommerce?
Product imagery helps customers understand what they’re buying before they can physically inspect it. Accurate color helps those images set a more reliable expectation of the product’s appearance.
Can a product photo show exactly the same color as the physical product?
It can aim to represent the product very closely, but exact reproduction on every customer’s screen isn’t possible. Displays, brightness settings, color profiles and viewing conditions can all influence how a color appears.
Why do product colors look different on different screens?
Different screens reproduce color differently and operate within different color spaces and profiles. Display calibration, brightness and environmental lighting can also affect how an image appears.
What’s the difference between color correction and color change?
Color correction adjusts an image so the photographed product’s existing color is represented more faithfully. Color change intentionally creates another color version of the product, usually to represent an additional product variant.
How can ecommerce brands improve product color accuracy?
Start with controlled lighting and correct white balance, use an appropriate color-management workflow, edit on a calibrated display and compare final imagery against the physical product or an approved reference wherever possible.
Can you create accurate product color variants without photographing every color?
Yes, when the underlying product is otherwise identical and only its color changes. A professionally edited master image can be used to create additional variants while retaining texture, lighting, shadows and highlights. If the actual product also changes in material, pattern, construction or other physical details, photographing the real variant is more appropriate.
The post Why Product Color Accuracy Matters in Ecommerce: Customer Expectations, Trust and Returns appeared first on Path Edits.