How do I get the standard shader to look like my albedo?

I just want my material to look like the actual texture. Sure, it will look darker when it has shadows on it, and it will look like a different color when the lighting casts some color to it. But when I'm creating textures it feels like a guessing game because I don't know what a color is actually going to look like under normal circumstances.

I have a woody texture with a rich vibrant brown, but when I plug this thing into a standard shader it instead has a completely different color, like I left it soaking on bleach overnight. The best I can do is set "metallic" to 0.5, which makes it less bright, but it still looks gray plus it now has a dull sheen.

the best I can do is try using some of the mobile shaders, and these work fine when a material doesn't need any normal maps or anything special, but it's kind of rare for that to be the case. Plus I have various objects that need to use special shaders I've picked up from the store, all of which are based on the "standard" shader, so if I can't get the material to look right with a standard shader, I can't get it to look right with the special custom shader.

How do I get a material to have the color I actually gave it?

 

Yes it is not always super simple to get the correct look out of the materials. The colors of your mesh will be influenced by the colors of the lights that you use and the ambient light settings inside the Lighting Environment tab. Ambient can change a lot about how colors will look in the end.

Have you compared your setup to an example project to get an idea in which way those textures might be different to yours?

can you post an screenshot and one of your textures?

Apart from that this is a pretty good guide of what pbr rendering (what the standard shader uses) does and what the values are expected, might help:
https://marmoset.co/posts/physically-based-rendering-and-you-can-too/
https://marmoset.co/posts/basic-theory-of-physically-based-rendering/

 

Some tips:
1. Use mobile diffuse shader
2. Use white color as ambient light:
Window->Rendering->Lighting->Environment