You go shopping for a high visibility jacket
You know? The type workmen wear while five of them watch one guy dig a hole.
They’re bright yellow, sometimes red or orange. Advertised as fluorescent or day-glow. Sometimes arguably called neon.
You find a website with your jacket, and take a look at the picture, except it looks dull. Flat. You’ve seen camouflage jackets looking brighter than the jacket in the image.
Why doesn’t fluorescence work on computer images?
To put it simply, your computer screen doesn’t show colours in the same way that a physical object does. It can’t show the difference between a strong yellow and a neon yellow.
Fluorescent colours look dull, metallic colours look flat.
Of course this is frustrating when trying to sell a fluorescent or metallic item on a website. We recently added fluorescent labels to our web store, but the pictures don’t do the product justice.
The workaround
Photographs can work well in showing these colours. Our brain can interpret the fluorescent colours by using the whole picture. Especially if there is a familiar object in the image, such as a person wearing the jacket.
Sorry to disappoint you, there’s no photo of me covered in neon labels.
We took an alternative solution, and can post samples of our fluorescent labels to customers in the post. It’s not ideal, but it works.
Unlike the five jacket wearing workmen “supervising”.
