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DimitraGKM
Participant
September 25, 2025
質問

Best Practices for Retouching Neon Colours in E-commerce Photography (Photoshop RGB Workflow)

  • September 25, 2025
  • 返信数 5.
  • 499 ビュー

I’m currently working on e-commerce photography for a new product release that features a lot of neon colours. As many of you will know, neon pigments don’t photograph the way they appear in real life — the camera tends to flatten or dull the vibrancy, and the colours lose the “neon pop” that customers see in person. I’m retouching in Photoshop and working in RGB, but I’m struggling to get flat neon areas (like paper and plastics) to look as bright and accurate as possible on screen.

I’d love any advice, workflows, or adjustment techniques you’ve found effective for making neon colours appear closer to reality in an RGB environment, while still keeping the images natural and suitable for e-commerce (not over-edited or gimmicky). Are there preferred adjustment layers, blend modes, or colour management practices you’d recommend? Any insight would be hugely appreciated!

返信数 5

J
Joe_Goldberg6988
Participant
October 2, 2025

For retouching neon colours in e-commerce photos: work non-destructively with adjustment layers, use masks to target only neon areas, adjust in LAB/HSL for better control, boost saturation carefully, and check results in different colour spaces. Add soft light painting or subtle overlays for glow, and watch for banding or unnatural shifts.

E
ExUSA
Legend
September 25, 2025

"Neon colors." Are you talking about pigments/dyes that have optical brighteners/fluorescing agents, so they transmit light as well as reflecting it? Neon is completely different.

You'll want to work in ProPhotoRGB, 16 bit, with a calibrated wide-gamut display. Convert to sRGB as the last step. As noted, some colors may be out of gamut and not even viewable with a lot of consumer-grade monitors and cheap mobile phones.

Use a camera with a 14 or 16-bit image pipeline, shoot RAW, and use a calibration target and custom profile. Don't skimp on lights as cheap ones often have color temperature variation from shot to shot. Profoto, Speedotron Black Line, Broncolor, Elinchrom, etc. are the best.

    J
    jefbr
    Inspiring
    October 2, 2025

    I feel like it would take a lot more time and require a substantial financial investment beforehand compared to a basic studio environment delivering 8 bit sRGB pictures straight from camera.

     

    Are you looking at this from a theoretical point of view, attempting to capture the neonlike qualities in camera?

    Are you basing this on experience in e-comm?

    Why would you consider your approach a best practice for e-comm compared to the alternatives?

     

    I'm really interested!

    J
    jefbr
    Inspiring
    November 17, 2025

    Without calibration, you have no idea what you are looking at or how it will show. Using a ColorChecker is good, I have custom RAW profiles created from a target, but that's not the whole answer.

    Are you getting complaints from customers?


    Honestly, zero complaints once we ditched the calibrated environment and realized the value of the histogram.

    For reference: I have been working for 15yrs at a multinational ecommerce company in various photography related roles ranging from on-set live color corrector to robotic photography developer to Photoshop Extendscript developer.

     

    We realized (as you said) that our clients are on a very wide range of devices, so we did what @D Fosse is saying: Get as close as we can. Remember, OPs question pertains to e-commerce so it imposes a limit to sRGB.

     

    When we still calibrated, we had complaints from people who complained that the pijama? pajama? papaya? PJ's they ordered showing Lightning McQueen from Cars wasn't 'hot pink' but red.

    Their kid thought they found the one Cars PJ in the world that was pink, and they were disappointed once they got their red PJ in the mail. (here it turned out that the editor didn't know how to correctly convert to 8bit sRGB and while their edits were good, their unskilled conversion botched it.)

     

    So, we decided it was better to get as close as possible as fast as possible.

    Start in 8bit sRGB and stay there. It's pretty much OK from the start, and if you have fluo, you click again at -1 stop. In a highly homogenic collection of images, you WILL notice that one image that is 1 stop underexposed.

    And then, it's simply a question of automating the image blending part.

     

    We A/B tested calibrated and uncalibrated workflows, serving them to +5 million clients for a month.

    The difference in customer satisfaction, clickthrough rate, purchased goods, etc. was neglible.

     

    What @D Fosse says below is very accurate.

    "The histogram is an incredibly useful diagnostic tool. But it tells you absolutely nothing about how the image actually looks."

     

    What his statement doesn't take into consideration is that we are in full control of our photo studio.

    We know what an image should look like because we built the environment in which the image is made.

    Ie, we know the background color, the models skin color, etcetera.

     
    In short: Calibrate your environment, not your screen.
    (Remember, OPs question pertains to e-commerce product photography.)
    D Fosse
    Community Expert
    D FosseCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    September 25, 2025

    As this will most likely be presented in sRGB, neon colors will basically be out of gamut. They can't be reproduced in sRGB.

     

    They will likely be reproducible in Adobe RGB and certainly ProPhoto, but you can't post that on the web (and you will need a wide gamut display to see it on screen).

     

    The best you can do is compensate and create an illusion. That's doable, but there's no magic trick.

      J
      jefbr
      Inspiring
      September 25, 2025

      What you could also consider...

      Use firefly (https://firefly.adobe.com/)

       

      Add an image, type your prompt (something like "make the picture look natural and fix the neon/fluo color") 

      Here is a before (L) and after (R) made using this kind of prompt.

      Not sure if it'll be enough for a massive batch of pictures, but it's good to think about this option with an eye on the future. 🙂

       

      J
      jefbr
      Inspiring
      September 25, 2025

      If you can, do a double exposure.

      Make one image using correct light, and one (darker) image that shows the fluo as it needs to be, or as close as you can get it.

      In photoshop, blend the two images together by using the difference layer blending mode to create a mask, refining it so it only brings through the fluo part.

       

      If you can't do a double exposure, and you only have a correct exposure image (so the fluo is blown out)...

      The true color of the fluo will be visible in the shadow parts of the image. You can color pick it and correct the fluo parts with any color correction technique (HSL adjustment layer, color match with curves, ...)

        c.pfaffenbichler
        Community Expert
        c.pfaffenbichlerCommunity Expert
        Community Expert
        September 25, 2025

        And when extreme Adjustments are necessary working in 16bit can help avoid banding. 

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