Digging

[guppiecat]

A while ago, I complained about photos of corn. This is an example of why.

At Ag Day in July, they set out these bins of seeds for kids to play in as if they were a sandbox. It was incredibly popular with the kids, so I took a lot of photos. What I didn’t realize at the time was that full sun reflecting off the corn would drastically change the highlights on people’s faces. In short, turning everyone bright orange. You’d think they’d be yellowed, but I guess the blood in the skin makes things orange.

Since I’m colour-blind, I may have mis-corrected, but what I found that worked was to process the photo like normal, then create an adjustment mask and hand-paint all the areas that were overly-highlighted (highlit?) and reduce the amount of orange in that mask. That results in a photo like this, where there’s a decent amount of yellow reflecting off the corn, but the people don’t look like painted monsters.

Originally posted at stories.starmind.org.

Comments

[amaebi]

Not overcorrected. The child's skin shows some sheen from the corn, in a way I'd call feature, not bug.

[brooksmoses]

Yup; I was going to say (as someone also not color-blind) that the correction amount looks just about right to me as well.

Those do look fun to play in!

[pameladean]

You can tell it's a reflection from the corn; it's very cool.

Children are interesting animals, aren't they?

P.