I’ve experienced this with half a dozen phones. Even when you try to edit the photo, you can almost never recover the actual colors that were in the sky.
In: Technology
Your eye sees colors because it has three types of cells (cone cells) that are sensitive to three different frequency ranges of light. The relative responses of the three types of cones in the same part of your eye determine the color you see in that part of you eye.
A camera is a sort of artificial eye that tries to mimic the way a human eye responds to light. Cameras have tiny light sensors called photosites that are sensitive to three different frequency ranges of light. For simplicity, I’ll call them red, green, and blue photosites, because that’s the color they appear if you look at them under a microscope. The red photosites are mostly sensitive to a range of light frequencies that appear red or orange. The green photosites are mostly sensitive to a range of light frequencies that appear bluish green, green, or yellow. The blue photosites are mostly sensitive to a range of light frequencies that appear bluish green, blue, or indigo. The photosites measure the intensity of the light that hits them in the frequency ranges that they are sensitive to. The camera takes the measurements of several nearby red, green, and blue photosites and applies some math to determine the color it will produce for that part of the image.
The bright orange of the clouds in a sunset will have a very strong red photosite measurement, somewhat less strong green photosite measurement, and a relatively weak blue photosite measurement.
The problem with phone cameras is that the photosites are very small, and thus can’t count too many light particles (photons) before they can’t count any higher. The measurement maxes out. We say the photosite has “saturated”. It’s sort of like a measuring cup overflowing when you overfill it. A photosite saturates when that part of the image is too bright in the range of light frequencies it is sensitive to. For the bright orange of clouds in a sunset, the red photosites will saturate before the green ones do, and thus the difference between red and green photosite measurements will be recorded inaccurately. This causes the resulting color to shift away from orange towards yellow. If the green photosites fill up also, the resulting color shifts towards a lighter yellow, and eventually to white.
Even if you had a more professional camera with bigger photosites that didn’t saturate, the camera still needs to figure out how to map the very bright colors it saw to a color that your screen can display. Most phone and computer screens don’t get very bright, and so the camera is going to make some compromises in the color mapping. Yellow is a brighter color than orange on your screen, so it may pick yellow instead of orange in an effort to represent the brightness more accurately while sacrificing the accuracy of the hue. White on your screen is brighter still than yellow, and so it may shift a bright orange or yellow towards white.
I used bright orange as my example, but all bright saturated colors have problems with photosite saturation and color mapping. They will typically shift towards the nearest primary or secondary color, and then towards white, depending on how bright they are and how the camera does its color mapping.
Adjusting the color after the photo is taken doesn’t really work, because the color was recorded inaccurately by the camera. The information has been lost. You’ll never get back the original colors unless you paint them in manually or isolate that part of the image to make adjustments.
The solution is to change the way you take the photos. Reduce the exposure setting in your camera so that the entire photo gets darker. That solves the photosite saturation problem and also the color mapping problem. Of course the photo then may be too dark for your liking, but that’s just one of the many challenges in photography and reproducing colors the way you want. The only problem left to solve may be adjusting the white balance, but that can be done after the photo is taken with some photo editing software.
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