It’s a tiny bit colder now in Vienna and the drizzle has changed to snow. Not much, but enough to give a nice morning view from my living room.
I like this image. Actually I like this very much, and I had already decided to make it the Image of the Day, but then one of the few images that I had shot in the Underground station caught my attention. I had not even noticed the runner when I took the shot.
It took me a long time to get to the point where I was more or less satisfied, and when I finally was, I decided to just try a square crop. It did work even better, it only required cloning out some distractions that were near the left edge now.
I did so, but somehow the image still did not look right. It was unbalanced, and suddenly it dawned to me: the square crop was OK, but I had cropped so that of the three lines that go down towards the lower right corner, the right one, the dark joint ran exactly into the corner. That was wrong, it had to be the middle line, the light one.
Well, no problem, that’s the beauty of Photoshop. Cloning had filled up my history, thus I could not go back, but when you’ve cropped, you can always “Image / Reveal all”, right?
Turned out I was wrong. When cropping I normally always use the option to “hide” and not “delete”, but not so this time. I was severely pissed. In order to get my desired crop, I had to re-do the whole image! I shortly contemplated ditching it altogether, but then I gave in and just did it again, using the layers of the original image as a model.
It was not that bad. Things are always easy when you know what you’re doing, and this finally nailed it: I am still not sure if the winter image is not what I really want, but after I have spent so much time with the runner, it simply has to be the Image of the Day.
"Run Run Run", originally from the Velvet Underground’s banana album, is the Song of the Day. I have it on a collection called “Gold”. Hear it on YouTube.