A photograph taken in a normally lit Indian living room, printed, comes out warmer than the room looked. Everybody notices it and almost nobody knows why.
Your eyes are correcting and the camera is not
Light has a colour, and different light sources have very different ones. Daylight is bluish; a warm household bulb is strongly orange.
Your visual system corrects for it automatically and continuously. Walk from daylight into a warm-lit room and within seconds white things look white again. You are not seeing the actual colour of the light — you are seeing the correction.
A camera attempts the same correction and does it partly. Automatic white balance is a guess, it is made once per photograph, and it is frequently wrong in a room with mixed light.
Then it prints, and the page has no ability to correct anything. The cast that was invisible in the room is now sitting on paper.
Why it is worse on paper than on screen
Two reasons that compound:
A screen was showing it to you under the same warm light, so your eyes were still correcting when you looked at the photograph. Looking at the print in daylight removes that.
Ink cannot be brighter than paper. A warm cast on a screen sits over a bright backlit white; on paper it sits over a fixed white, so it reads as heavier. Why printed colours differ from screens →
The fix is before the photograph, not after
Photograph near a window, in the daytime, with the indoor lights off. That is the whole answer and it is worth more than every correction available afterwards.
| Situation | Do |
|---|---|
| Daytime, indoors | Turn the lights OFF, use the window |
| Evening, one warm lamp | Accept the warmth. It is atmosphere |
| Mixed tube and bulb | Turn one of them off |
| A function hall | Nothing. Take more photographs |
⚠️ Turning the lights off during the day is counter-intuitive and it works. A room lit by a window and a bulb has two colours of light in it; a room lit only by the window has one.
When the cast is the point
Do not fix a warm evening. A room at night, a festival, candles, a kitchen at dinner — the warmth is what the evening was, and a colour-corrected version looks like a different, colder occasion.
The cast is a problem when it is unintentional and a feature when it is not, and only you know which.
What we do about it
Nothing, deliberately. We do not colour-correct, and files print as sent.
That is the same position as skin tones and for the same reason: a warm photograph might be a mistake or might be the evening, and deciding on your behalf would be guessing. Skin tones in print →
If you want a cast removed, adjust it before sending — every phone has a warmth slider in its editor, and moving it slightly cooler is usually all that is needed.
Frequently asked
Why do my indoor photos look orange? Household bulbs emit strongly orange light. Your eyes correct for it in the room; the camera only partly does, and paper cannot correct at all.
How do I stop it? Photograph near a window during the day with the indoor lights switched off.
Why does it look worse printed than on my phone? Because you were looking at your phone under the same warm light, so your eyes were still correcting.
Do you fix colour casts? No. A warm photograph may be a mistake or may be the evening, and we would be guessing.
Should I always correct it? No. For a night, a festival or candlelight the warmth is the occasion.
Part of our guide to paper and printing. See also: skin tones in print and the photographs nobody thinks to take.
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