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Can anyone suggest why my pictures look washed out? I'm using Tadaa on my iPhone in a lightbox that has a strip of LEDs in it.

Why do my images look like this:



Instead of like this:

White background will often wash out the subject, particularly when you're at the mercy of a phone's camera.

If your phone has white balance settings, have a play with those and see if you cam find an artificial light setting.

Alternatively, you can correct the white balance and/or the light and shadow levels in image editing software.

Use the camera+ app.

Thanks. I'll try these suggestions.

I adjusted the vibrancy in Photoshop and got this. Obviously it will be better to get better pics in the first place, but at least this is an improvement.

Yep, working with a white backrgound is tough at best.

When I take a photo I use a camera w/ no flash and good lighting. I then adjust the image with "white balance" in GIMP and then adjust brightness/contrast as needed.

While I don't want to be a camera snob, an actual camera might be a better option than an iphone + apps. Having optical zoom and a better (shorter) focal distance will improve all aspects of your image taking.

This doesn't have to be expensive! There are cameras in the 100USD range that can do a decent job of it. I use a Sony Cybershot DSC-WX1 and have been very happy with it.

You might also consider different lights, as the spectrum of your LEDs might be contributing to the problem. I use full spectrum (high temperature) Verilux fluorescent bulbs in a couple of cheap Wal-Mart purchased lamps.

Modern high end phone cameras can be surprisingly good. You might want to swap out the LEDs and see if a different light source would work better and make sure the you tap on the image of the model before taking the snap to get the exposure correct for the model rather than the white background. If it keeps adjusting the exposure for the white background instead of the model the images are always going to look dull and underexposed.

It can be better to use an non-white background, you can download photography backgrounds off the internets and print them out.

If you have a recent iPhone with a multi-LED flash you can even try turning the flash on. Old school flashes are horrid, but the multi-LED ones are actually pretty good at tuning themselves to the subject matter. Give it a shot, if it doesn't work just turn it off again, it depends on your other lighting.

In general iPhones do tend to give a more "neutral" or even duller colour profile than other phones, it's not bad because some other phones crank the vibrancy too much and lose colour information so they look like arse when you try and dull them back down in post processing... the downside is if you DO want a vibrant picture on an iPhone sometimes you have to fiddle around in post processing.

I don't use any special photography apps on mine, but even the default camera app has a brightness adjustment which you can fiddle with, after tapping on the model to get the auto-exposure a little sun will appear next to the focus box, drag it up and down to manually adjust the brightness if the image is too dull due to the auto-exposure getting confused by the white background.

The images in my gallery are mostly taken on an old point and shoot camera (that was quite expensive back in the day) but my iPhone SE that I bought a couple of months back takes better snaps than it now, unfortunately I don't have any pics in my gallery taken with it yet. The iPhone SE has the same camera as the iPhone 6s.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Modern high end phone cameras can be surprisingly good. .

Well, yes, of course. It's part of the reason they cost so much!

For endless camera phone comparison fun, go to http://www.gsmarena.com/. The iPhones seem to have the reds and green colors washed out a bit compared to Samsung's offerings, so you're probably on to something about the iPhone.

Try this link http://www.gsmarena.com/piccmp.php3?idType=1&idPhone1=8065&idPhone2=7759&idPhone3=7243 comparing an iPhone7+ against a Galaxy A7 to see it in action.

The white background certainly doesn't help - the camera will certainly get exposure readings that will throw the image and result in "washed out" and over-exposed pictures.

Using a colour (or grey) graduated background will help a lot (you can download suitable pieces and print them yourself).

Yeah, Apple is intentionally a bit duller (lower colour saturation I think would be the term?) than the competition (I think the argument being its easier to add colour saturation in post processing than remove it and the competition sometimes goes too far with oversaturation which is hard to remove in post) . But that said it's a reasonably subtle difference you possibly wouldn't notice unless you had 2 pics side by side. Best to fix the potential set up problems first.

I'm wondering if not focusing on the subject is the problem:

Some of my pics are much better than others. The difference could be whether I tapped the screen to focus on the subject.
I understand the problems with white backgrounds, but part of the rationale for gettting the lightbox was that I really like white backgrounds for miniature shots!

This one looks better than the DP, for example: