How to Get Gets Natural Color Without Buying a New Camera

Your camera probably isn’t the reason your color looks dull. This video makes the case that the real gains come from how you handle light, exposure, and a few choices you lock in while you shoot.

Coming to you from Ian Worth, this grounded video starts with a simple split: if you edit, shoot in raw; if you shoot JPEG, commit to your color decisions in camera. When Worth talks about raw, he’s not pitching a “pro” mindset, he’s talking about flexibility, especially with white balance. If you rely on JPEG, he warns you to get close to the final look at capture because those color decisions stick. He also calls out a common sunset problem: auto white balance can cool the scene and erase the warmth you saw, so trying “cloudy” or “shade” can keep the mood intact. He references bodies like the OM SYSTEM OM-1 Mark II and the Fujifilm X-H2 to show that the same approach carries across systems.

Worth then moves into the part most people skip: using the histogram as a color tool, not just an exposure tool. He explains it in plain terms and pushes you to use a live histogram if your camera offers it, or at least check it after the shot. The key point is that sloppy exposure tends to force heavy color work later, which is where images start to look strange or brittle. He adds an extra layer by talking about an RGB histogram, where a single channel can clip even if the overall brightness graph looks fine. That’s the kind of issue that turns skies into flat blocks that won’t grade cleanly, and he says it can show up more than you’d expect. He also gets into picture profiles and “recipes,” and how they change what you see on the screen, which can quietly steer your decisions before you even realize you’re reacting to the profile instead of the underlying capture.

Once he switches to editing, the advice stays practical and it doesn’t assume you want a stylized look. He starts from a basic profile in Lightroom and puts white balance first, but he’s honest about how hard it is to judge color after staring at one frame for too long. He recommends stepping away and returning with fresh eyes, especially when you bounce between very different scenes like sunsets and forests. He mentions a quick way to make white balance shifts easier to see by temporarily pushing saturation high, then pulling it back once the temperature and tint feel right. He also talks about the tone curve as a simple lever for contrast that often brings color along with it, and he describes how his own use of it has changed over time while still treating it as a reliable tool.

The most intriguing section is his approach to color casts, because he frames it as something you often don’t notice until it’s too late. He shows a Photoshop move that can test and reduce a global wash of color across the frame, and he claims it fixes the problem most of the time with only a couple of clicks. He doesn’t pretend it’s magic, and he points out you can dial it back if it removes too much of the scene’s real color, using opacity or a mask. From there, he touches on local color work, where you adjust color in specific areas instead of pushing the whole frame in one direction, which can keep skies, shadows, and highlights from collapsing into one tone. He closes by shifting back outdoors, tying color to light angle and camera position, including why shooting straight into the sun can wash out a scene fast and why side or back light tends to hold saturation in a more believable way. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Worth.