COLOUR
There was a problem with the colour in your photo(s).

This may be due to one of two reasons:

Your photo has a strong colour cast that makes the photos look too red/blue/yellow etc.
Your photo is saturated too little or too much. Over saturating is more common and causes colours to become very strong, almost neon like.
If you are using a digital camera, the incorrect colours can be a result of an improper setting of the white balance in your camera. A common cause of a colour rejection is an incorrect white balance in night shots. If your night photo looks very orange than please adjust your white balance so you get an image that is bluer.

Other colour casts can usually be corrected using the colour balance sliders in Photoshop or other image editing software.

If the image is a scan of a photo or slide, then please check your scanner settings to ensure you are using 16-bit colours or higher. You might also experience problems with poor colours if you use a too high compression level when saving your scanned jpeg files. You should also have your monitor and video card properly set up for 24 bit colour or higher (usually called "true colour"). Windows users can easily check this by right clicking on the desktop and looking in display settings.

If you are scanning very old pictures, particularly (but not limited to) E-6 slides more than 25 or so years old, there may be a very strong colour shift. Most recent scanning and photo editing software have specific functions designed to restore the colours of old pictures.

If you think you have been able to improve the photos, please re-upload them. Do not forget to include a note to the screeners, detailing what you have done to improve the image. There is a special field available for such notes. Please note that we are still very interested in having these photos in our database, we only ask that you try to improve the quality of the images as much as possible.

left side: color cast; right side: corrected version - Photo copyright © Thierry Deutsch

color cast rejection / accepted version - Photo copyright © Walter van Bel

Getting the colours right can be tough especially if the photo was taken under challenging lighting conditions; the automatic colour adjustment in programs like PS or PSP might help you getting them right however sometimes even they fail. In that case try playing around with the manual color adjustment sliders until you get rid of any colour cast. In some cases (e.g.: night photography) you'll keep a certain color cast no matter what you do; here you'll have to trust your own feeling. Leaving a note to the screeners helps getting both sides onto the same level of understanding.