Have you ever purchased an article of clothing in a store based on the color, only to bring it home and find that it's an entirely different color
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I think that it's likely that this wasn't a deliberate action on the part of the manufacturer, it's a characteristic of the dye / fabric combination and the lights where you bought it.
Human visual processing is very complicated; one of the things that your brain tries to deal with is guessing the "actual" color of items based on context, even in the case where the light isn't all that great. Fluorescent lights (particularly the cheap ones) produce poor lighting: the light produces is distinctively "colored". It has a two large frequency spikes, and doesn't provide much light in other frequencies.
The result is that it is difficult to judge color accurately. A more extreme version of this same phenomena occurs with sodium vapor lamps (as often seen in bridge and tunnel lighting).
Anyway, in a perfect world the shop would have better lighting. Barring that, you can try to bring the clothes near windows so that you can judge the color in sunlight. Alternately, you can bring your own lamp (Ott-lite makes a portable wide-spectrum
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Human visual processing is very complicated; one of the things that your brain tries to deal with is guessing the "actual" color of items based on context, even in the case where the light isn't all that great. Fluorescent lights (particularly the cheap ones) produce poor lighting: the light produces is distinctively "colored". It has a two large frequency spikes, and doesn't provide much light in other frequencies.
The result is that it is difficult to judge color accurately. A more extreme version of this same phenomena occurs with sodium vapor lamps (as often seen in bridge and tunnel lighting).
Anyway, in a perfect world the shop would have better lighting. Barring that, you can try to bring the clothes near windows so that you can judge the color in sunlight. Alternately, you can bring your own lamp (Ott-lite makes a portable wide-spectrum ( ... )
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My experience shopping in department stores is that there's usually not much access to windows, but bringing my own lamp is a decent idea.
As for photography, well, I'm far more into matching my wardrobe... whatever that means. ;)
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