It does not happen very often that I get asked to take an image and, funnily enough, the last two times it happened in baker’s shops, the last time this Friday, when I was on my way to the train to Carinthia.
The girls asked me if I would take an image, posed, I had one chance, and then they got busy and I had to hurry on. I gave them my card, promising the image for an email.
Once on the train, I immediately began working on the image. Oh my, was white balance off! I still had the camera set to “Cloudy”, and everything was somewhere between yellow and red. With the mixed light in the shop, everything artificial, but from different sources, fooling with the eyedropper tool proved inefficient, thus I chose white balance manually, strictly checking for natural skin color. I have also equalized the skin tones. In the original, the three have different color and tone, and as normal as this is in reality, as distracting is can look in an image. The rest is standard procedure. Medium discoloring of the background, normalization of background luminance (the right side was brighter), some accentuation of the faces and so on. For an image taken under much less than ideal conditions and with one chance for some seconds, the result is quite OK.
The Song of the Day is “Girls On My Mind” from David Byrne’s 1992 album “Uh-Oh”. See the video on YouTube.