Brockly is spot on about looking for things like the plugs or bases that you know should be white or gray. They are a good indicator of whether you are seeing something close to the correct colors or not. Shots where more than just one coral is visible can also be enlightening. While it is relatively easy to tweak one coral to go from bland to awesome in Photoshop, it is much harder when there are multiple corals with different colors.
He is also right on about turning off the LED blue channel for pics. Cameras are much more sensitive to blue than the human eye is which is tuned more towards green. I was running my own brand of LEDs and would turn the blue channel off completely for pics but the white channel still had some blue in it. To the eye, the coral colors would look very yellow and blah, but the pictures would still be too blue. They could be corrected to what I considered to be about a 15K look by basically just doing a gray level adjust on the black egg crate (or something else that I knew was gray like the colony base) which would get me close. Other than than, I might adjust the brightness or contrast a bit. I never tweaked the RGB color levels themselves. I found that would almost always create color issues like you see in the pics that were posted. With my LED lights running normally with the blue channel on, the pictures would be so far out of whack on blue that they could not be adjusted to make them look anywhere close to correct.
White egg crate aggravates the problem when using LED. The camera does pick up disco ball colors on the white from the individual LEDs that you don't see with the eyes. These will usually just be spots of colors though and if you know what you are looking at, you can discount these as not being color manipulation. In the pics where the egg crate looks almost solid yellow, that is almost certainly due to the red level being too high for one reason or another. Again, the pics look more like poor photography or color correction than intentional misrepresentation.
One reason that I took group pics for the customers is that it is much harder to fake colors when you have multiple different colored corals in the same shot. It also helps to get the colors correct if you are manipulating the pic in Photoshop. There is nothing like having a red, green and blue coral in the same pic to keep you honest....
BTW, there was a big sale on R2R a month or so ago where the vendor had pics of the corals under both blue and standard lighting. I was very impressed with how well they had done representing the coral honestly under both lighting schemes so you really had a good sense for what you would be getting. There were more corals visible in the pics than just the main one which helped as well. Unfortunately, I don't remember which supplier that was or I would give them a shout-out. Having tried to do the same thing for years I know how hard it can be.
My main point is that if you buy a coral from an on-line supplier from a pic, you should expect that same coral (or something that looks very close to it) to arrive on your door-step. If you don't, you shouldn't let them put the blame on you. It is their job to fairly represent the coral that they are selling and then deliver the coral that they sold to you in good condition. Once it is put into your hands in good shape, then the burden is on you.
--- Ken
