DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Last Fall I took a picture of a Greek church in Ia, Santorini, lit up by the setting sun. It’s my favorite picture from that trip.

My original correction, shown above, is too orange. In reality, the church was lit by an orange-red sunset, but I think this version is not believable. My eyes would not have perceived that color; the human brain has, in effect, a realtime DSP doing advanced curve corrections on the input video stream. A human observer would have “seen” a white church, not an orange one.

Here’s the original image, as saved by the camera. Note that this is no more genuine or real than any corrected version; the camera is far worse at perceiving color than even a human with poor eyesight, e.g. me. But that’s where Photoshop comes in.

Last weekend I opened up the original image with the intent of making as large a print as I could. I began to tweak the colors, and experienced a disturbing deja vu — I’ve worked on this image too many times. I didn’t want to do it again.

I opened up a corrected version, saved for a calendar we made last December. The colors were great! The church walls appear white, with still enough red in the walls to suggest a sunset. The color of the dome was particularly appealing; that is the exact shade of blue I remember from Greece.

But this calendar image was too small for my current project; I had reduced its resolution prior to saving. This time, I needed the full frame. And I couldn’t imagine trying to rewrite whatever curves might have yielded this image. Knowing what I could achieve didn’t really help; it would probably take longer to reproduce this result than to make an all-new correction… but if the new one wasn’t as successful, I’d be able to see it immediately. Not good.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” I thought, “if I’d saved the correction curves last time?” As it turns out, I had. This was a lucky break, and a big relief; it saved me from doing something I’d done twice before.

A smarter way to work would be to save max-resolution images in .psd format, using Adjustment Layers for corrections. This makes it even easier to edit curves, because the loading and saving happen automatically. I’ll have to change my workflow.