DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I’m still trying to catch up on last year’s digital images. Some of the photos needed surgery.

An ambient-light photo of a Lego cathedral presented an obvious need for color correction, but my typical approach (using Photoshop’s Curves) failed. The red channel was completely blown out, and the blue channel was horribly noisy. I could have prevented some of this damage by adjusting the camera’s white balance before making the exposure… but I guess it doesn’t matter, as I was able to fix it.

The “after” image is the result of two channel blends, which attempted to bring the red channel back into a usable state, and which attempted to reduce some of the distortion in the blue plate, followed by Curves. I think it worked pretty well. Certainly the cast is gone. For comparison, see this version in which curves were applied without first blending channels — notice that the red cast is still present.

(The cathedral pictured here was part of a Christian-themed Lego display we visited over the holidays. It included a near-life-sized Nativity scene and a miniature rendition of Bethlehem, complete with tiny Lego sheep.)