Tuesday, February 1, 2011
It's Not Easy Being Green
As I mentioned earlier, I am an amateur photographer (with emphasis on amateur) and it brings a new dimension to baseball cards for me. Sometimes I find myself looking at the pictures and wonder what the photographer was trying to do. Sometimes I find myself looking at the pictures and what what the photographer was thinking. Case in point:
My first thought was that this was a printing problem. However, when I searched on this card on Ebay, it seems they all suffer from the same muted, green tint. So, I have to wonder if it was a problem with the photography. What follows is my best guess as to what happened. I may be right or I may be way off base. YMMV.
My first thought (because I am always overthinking things) was that the white balance was wrong. White balance is the process of removing unrealistic color casts in the photograph. It is accomplished by making sure white photographs as white regardless of the ambient light conditions. For example, if your camera is set for daylight, any picture taken under flourescent light will have a yellow cast. If you camera is set for flourescent, pictures taken in sunlight will have a blue cast. In digital camera, white balance is a simple setting. Before digital, it meant matching the film to the lighting. So, I opened it up in Photoshop Camera Raw and played around with the temperature adjustment. No dice.
To make a long story not nearly so long, I played around with a number of different settings, still without much luck. Sitting back and looking at it again, it struck me that his pants were pretty much blown out and there was a lack of detail on the stands in the background. So, I finally did what I should have done from the beginning: I made exposure adjustments. The result:
Still not perfect, but looking better. In the end, my guess is that the photographer just screwed up and took an over-exposed shot.
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