[Lee Stewart]

Originally Posted by Jonesy

Pics of my car are on a cloudy day. The color does look different. When it used to be my daily driver, I would park it on the street under the street lights and it looked different then too. The pic of the thumbnail is under fluorescent lighting.
Maybe it has to do with the metallic in the paint.

Fluorescent lights and mercury lights make many colors look much lighter then they do in sunlight, shade, cloudy or under incandescent lights

Here is a perfect example - a photo taken by mrays at a Mecum auction. Compare it to a photo taken in sunlight:







It has to do with what the color temperature (on the Kelvin Scale) of what white is based on a black body curve (see photo below). Lights that are "super white" like the mercury lights above have a white color temperature in the 11,000 K range (called COOL) while lights that are lower on the BBC - nearer the red zone are called WARM and will have a white color temperature of around 5400K. Ever see the whitening liquid you put in a washing machine when you do your whites - it's blue.

If you have a really good camera and know what you are doing, you can adjust the color temperature to compensate for different lighting situations. BTW - Fluorescent lights have a tendency to add a green tint to a photo.