Here's why you never trust photos found online for color ref

[Jennings]

I was just looking through some F-16 aggressor stuff this evening, and I came across these two photos. Both were downloaded from different places online. They're exactly the same image (credit: USAF, no copyright), but sourced from two different sites. They had different file names and were of different pixel sizes, so they had obviously been manipulated prior to being posted to their respective locations. I opened both of them up, and the only thing I changed was to make them both exactly the same pixel width for comparison here. I didn't do anything whatever to the colors, brightness, contrast, or anything. I opened both up in Photoshop and did a screen shot of both windows together. Note the fairly dramatic difference in tone, especially in the light tan base color. People often post things about "it matches up to a photo I found on XYZ web site", to which I invariably reply, "Don't use photos you find online for color reference!". Here's why... And this is a very tame example. I could probably find others really quickly that would be much more dramatic.

J

[FAR148]

Nice work Jennings,

You can also add if one has not calibrated his or her monitor, that too will throw the color off.

Steven L

[HoveringCheesecake]

While browsing defenseimagery.mil I have noticed that sometimes the military itself will have multiple copies of the same picture with different filenames and some color adjustments.

[yardbird78]

A lot of the older photos that were shot to film have color problems as well. Color emulsions had a bad habit of changing hues and colors, especially if stored in warm or hot places.

Darwin

[ian_maw]

It's not just the person who manipulates the photo to consider,

Here are two photos taken about 1.5 seconds apart by the same camera.

metering mode=pattern, white balance=automatic. The only manipulation I did was to resize them for the purpose of this post, no other tweaking was done.

[Pinhead]

That Dutch J-136 looks like it is in Cold Lake AFB for Maple Flag. A lot of my pictures are similar because of the changing light conditions. If you found the right exposure on a jet all you had to do was wait a few seconds and it would change as it made its way across the sky.

I absolutely agree that you can not count on a picture to give you an exact colour. I have a picture of our Canadian BAE Hawks, 2 in the same picture, one slightly above the other and the dark blue colour of the jet looks different on both jets.

On needs to dig farther than pictures if one wants exacting info.

Dan

[model_madness]

Valid point, however, more often than not, online ref pics are realistically all most modellers have access to.

And besides, if your not a OCD rivet counter, close is good enough IMO.

Edited June 7, 2010 by model_madness

[Jennings]

Valid point, however, more often than not, online ref pics are realistically all most modellers have access to.

And besides, if your not a OCD rivet counter, close is good enough IMO.

True, but then you can be led to believe that the P-51D "Lou IV" had blue camouflage. Or that the color under the quarter panels on P-47 razorbacks and P-40s was something besides the local camouflage color.

I figure if I'm going to spend as much time and energy as it takes to build a nice looking model, why not at least attempt to get the colors right? If close enough were always good enough, people would be really upset with decal artists who weren't anal retentive.

J