What to wear in photographs and on video calls

A camera is a worse judge of colour than your eyes and a much harsher one. Your visual system corrects for the light in the room before you are aware of it; a sensor does not, it guesses, and then a piece of software applies a second guess on top. Everything a palette does is amplified in a photograph — the colours that suit you suit you more, and the ones that do not fail more obviously and permanently.

Which is why this is the one situation where following your season is worth doing deliberately rather than approximately. A bad clothing choice on a Tuesday lasts a day. A bad one in a headshot, a wedding party, a graduation set or a video call you take four times a week lasts as long as the file does.

Why the camera exaggerates

Three things stack up.

White balance moves your skin. A camera decides what counts as white in the scene and shifts everything relative to it. Wear a large area of strong colour and it becomes part of that calculation — a saturated warm garment can push the whole frame cooler in compensation, taking your face with it. This is the mechanism behind "why do I look green in this photo".

Fabric bounces light upward. In person this is a subtle effect. Under a bright key light, or outdoors in the middle of the day, it is not: a large light-coloured garment reflects its colour straight onto the underside of your jaw and chin. Photographers use this intentionally with reflectors. You are wearing an uncontrolled one.

Contrast is compressed. A photograph has less dynamic range than your eye, so the difference between your face and a very dark or very light garment is rendered harder than it looked in the mirror. Anything that was slightly overpowering becomes plainly overpowering.

What to wear, in one paragraph

A mid-value colour from your palette, in a matte fabric, in a solid, with the largest area of it on your upper body. That single sentence covers most of what a photographer would tell you and all of what a palette adds to it.

Mid-value because the extremes are where compression bites: very light fabric blows out and takes detail with it, very dark fabric closes up into a shape with no texture. Matte because satin, sequins and anything metallic create specular highlights the sensor handles badly. Solid because fine stripes and small checks alias against the sensor grid — the shimmering moiré effect that ruins video especially. Upper body because a photograph is mostly a photograph of your head.

The colour, by family

The general advice is to wear "your best colour", which is not helpful if you do not know which of twelve that is. The version that is useful: pick the colour in your palette that sits closest to the middle of its own value range, and prefer the one with some chroma over the neutral.

Spring colouring. The clear warm mid-tones photograph best — a warm green, a clear coral, a golden camel. Avoid pure white next to your face outdoors; it goes blue in shade and it is the brightest thing in the frame.

Summer colouring. The soft cool mids — a dusty blue, a soft rose, a mid grey-blue. This family is the most likely to disappear in a photograph if it dresses in its own softness top to bottom, so a slightly stronger note than usual near the face is worth taking.

Autumn colouring. The saturated warm mids — a true olive, a rust, a warm teal. This family photographs unusually well in warm afternoon light and unusually badly under cool fluorescent office lighting, which is worth knowing before a headshot appointment.

Winter colouring. The clear cool mids and one strong note — a true red, a cobalt, a clear emerald. This is the only family for which black is a genuine option in a photograph, and even here a colour will hold detail better than black will.

If you have not resolved which of the twelve you are, the three questions do it, and each season page lists its palette with hex values you can match a garment against.

Video calls are a different problem

A webcam is a small sensor in bad light making aggressive automatic decisions, and it re-makes them continuously. Three specifics matter more than colour choice.

Your background is competing with you. Auto-exposure meters the whole frame, so a bright window behind you turns you into a silhouette regardless of what you are wearing. Put the window in front of you or beside you. Daylight on your face is the single biggest improvement available, and it is free.

Do not wear the colour of your wall. If your top and the wall behind you are close in value and temperature, the camera's edge detection blurs the two and you look flat. A colour from your palette that separates from the wall is doing two jobs at once.

Green screens are literal. Virtual backgrounds key out a colour range, and a green or teal top will be partly removed along with the room. If your palette's strongest colour is a green — and several of the twelve have one — this is the one occasion to use a different one.

Group photographs, where a palette stops being about you

Weddings, family portraits and team shots introduce a second constraint: everyone has to work together, and not everyone has the same colouring. The usual solution — pick one colour, put everybody in it — is the one that guarantees it will be wrong for somebody.

The approach that survives contact with a real group is to fix the value and the temperature range and let people choose within it. "Mid-depth, cool, no black" is a brief that a summer and a winter can both satisfy in colours that suit them. A single named shade is not.

If you are the one being coordinated and the assigned colour is outside your palette, the fixes are the usual ones: distance, adjacency and area. Your own lipstick and your own jewellery are almost always still yours to choose.

The honest limit

Lighting beats clothing. A photograph taken in good soft light with the wrong colour on will outperform one taken under an overhead office fixture with the right colour on, every time. This page is worth about as much as opening a curtain, and if you can only do one of the two, open the curtain.

What a palette adds is a shortlist for the moment you are standing in front of a wardrobe with ten minutes to go, which is when this decision is actually made.