Why your silk looked different on arrival
The colour problem in online saree retail, and the boring fix we settled on.
Almost every complaint in online saree retail is the same complaint. The red was browner. The green was flatter. The gold read yellow.
Silk is the hardest material to photograph honestly, because it reflects rather than absorbs. Shoot it under warm studio light and a madder red gains ten percent of orange. Shoot it against white and every mid-tone drops a step. Neither is a lie anyone intended — it is just what happens when nobody fixes the light.
Some of our sarees look duller on screen than competitors do. They also look the same in your hands.
So we fixed the shoot instead of the photo. Every saree is lit at 5000K, placed against an 18% grey card, and colour-corrected to that card rather than to taste. The card is in the frame while we shoot and cropped out before you see it.
The cost of this is that our photographs are less flattering than they could be. The benefit is that the shade you choose is the shade that arrives, and if it is not, you have ten days to send it back and we pay both ways.