colors dont show in pics

[sticklypear]

My peanut cacti has some of the prettiest flowers in my garden. Red with a tinge of purple absolutly stunning. Problem is no matter where the light is with or without flash those colors just dont show in a pic. Just looks like red blooms. now I know theres nothing like seeing it in person but the colors are so deep I would have thought even a cheap camera would pic them up

[iann]

Cheap cameras tend to over-expose and over-saturate reds. It is a common problem.

[daiv]

Yep, very difficult to get those reds.

[Wallydraigle]

Those weird fluorescent colors are just out of gamut for any imaging device. Plus, the effect is partly entoptic, because the colors are so vibrant that they oversaturate the cones in the eye and stuff.

[amanzed]

Ooh, new word for me, entoptic. That's interesting, I was wondering about the same thing. My $100 point-and-shoot seems okay on scarlet and fire-engine red (anything from straight red to the orange side of red) but on magenta and purple it's truly terrible. And that's a problem for cacti since so many flowers are on the magenta side of red.

[vlani]

When shot in RAW and hand-processed, reds show OK. Not always, depends on light and things.. The key is to lower contrast when you post-process the image.

[tumamoc]

The range you get with RAW formatted images is pretty amazing. Much better than jpg.