Photography and PCA

12-Tone SciART analysts are taught to use full spectrum lighting and calibrated drapes to create and evaluate colour effects against the skin in carefully controlled, neutral grey conditions. In the studio, the aim is to eliminate, as far as possible, visual distractions, unintended contrasts, and any unwanted effects cast by adjacent colour or colours. In this system, face-to-face PCA is the unrivaled gold standard, and it is made clear to trainees that photography is an inferior medium for determining an individual’s personal colour tone. And yet many analysts use client pictures and reveal photos on our websites and promotional material, visually demonstrating the effects of colour choices, so clearly we see some value in the power of photographs to convey colour information and persuade – and the reader may feel a bit confused and conflicted by this apparent contradiction.

Yes, you can tell a lot from a photo, and often still more from a selection of them. Colour harmony certainly can be conveyed to a greater or lesser extent within the technical limits of the medium, sometimes with remarkable accuracy. We acknowledge the relatively high fidelity of modern colour photography when we select our best colours to wear for a family portrait, and of course this is also the reason that many SciART-trained analysts offer their clients a selection of bridal white options for the most expensive photographic session most people ever undergo. Similarly, photos are used in catalogues, on real estate websites, for advertising in all forms, and in online retail, because a picture can be worth a thousand words and more.

The trouble is, we don’t always know how faithful the colour rendering is. We can never be completely sure that something hasn’t been “lost in translation”. Whenever we take a photograph the image is affected by the prevailing lighting conditions, camera settings, and by the selective effects of in-camera digital processing. Even if the image is not manipulated further, the act of uploading to a site and then the varied calibration of individual screens imposes further transpositions between the reader and the reality – and the viewer has to take the resulting image on trust.

As a result, so often we buy things online only to find that the colour is not as expected. Online colours can photograph and/or be modified by software to appear more or less saturated than they really are. Objects in photographs and digital imagery can appear lighter, darker, more or less saturated, or more or less magenta, yellow or cyan-toned than they are in reality. We have all sent a friend a picture with a comment to the effect that it “doesn’t do the subject justice” or “it’s not as bright/reddish/green as that in real life”. Many people, even those with no great conscious interest in colour, are careful to very deliberately qualify these judgements: “This looks great, at least from this shot.” Some colour and textural effects are very difficult to photograph, especially with entry-level skills or equipment.

Human skin, the feature of first interest in 12-Tone PCA, presents particular challenges. Our individual skin tone is the sum of a complex structure of living layers and pigments, with a distinctive semi-translucent finish caused by the subsurface scattering of light. The subtle organic look and texture of skin is notoriously difficult to render convincingly in art and CGI, and hard to capture on film with complete accuracy – and the difficulty of reproducing it is reflected in the eternal quest of many women for the perfect foundation, one which adequately simulates their skin’s properties and nuances with nothing more than “pixellated” granules of pigment. Properties other than colour and texture can be just as hard or harder to show onscreen. Not only can a colour ordered online prove unexpected when viewed in real life, but garments are returned because the fit is off, or because of other issues – hand, fabric weight or quality, finish – not apparent from the screen views. Conversely, camera hardware choices and settings can warp the view: a house that looks light and spacious on the virtual tour may be smaller and of different proportions in real life, with wide-angle and false perspectives misleading us.

So it is with human faces, with their unique lines, angles, planes and proportions. Subtle colour shifts and lens distortions in close-up can combine to produce optical illusions and mislead the eye about what is really going on in someone’s facial architecture. Who has never exclaimed or thought something like “Oh, you look so different in real life”? While photos are a wonderful resource, we must always remember that they are not the direct evidence of our own eyes. For PCA purposes, they can give useful impressions (most of us will have had a gut reaction, favourable or not, to reveal shots) but the person at any remove from the experience cannot know how faithful these captures are, and there will always be a strong element of “you had to be there” in attempting to evaluate them. There is no substitute for seeing the person in real life, as there are simply too many potential variables for pictures to be a trustworthy representation of the myriad factors and interactions that make human skin and tones so individual. Photographs, then, have great interest and genuine value, but we must always have some caution about what they are showing us. A photograph represents a memory or interpretation of an experience and can do this with great power, but it is never the reality itself. We must be careful not to ask too much of it.