No, actually it's not. And it's not simply a color "shift" either. The leaves were originally green, and the effect was achieved by converting to lab color and dramatically altering the blue/yellow and green/magenta. Normally I don't do dramatically processed images (to the point of altering colors, etc), but I thought the effect actually proved to be quite realistic, albeit in a different season. This photo was taken in Alaska on a trail near Eklutna Lake. That was one of my favorite places I went while in Alaska. I've got some great images from that shoot which I will be posting soon (hopefully).

Working in lab color is amazing for doing white balance adjustments since you basically have the same blue/yellow green/magenta control, but instead of just sliders which adjust the white balance of every pixel evenly, you can apply curves adjustments which allows, for example, adjusting the cool white balance of the shadow portions of the image without affecting the (usually much warmer) brighter or sunny areas.

In other news: yesterday I upgraded to Snow Leopard (10.6). Overall it's not that much different feature-wise (except a few system level plugins don't work). Exposé is definitely nicer, and Finder is, surprisingly, noticeably speedier, especially when loading thumbnails, previews, etc. Snow Leopard does change the gamma from 1.8 to 2.2 which doesn't affect color managed images, but web colors and unmanaged web images are noticeably darker. The images on my website are color managed, but things like the grey backgrounds appear darker in SL. Interesting. I'm actually a fan of this move because now web colors on a Mac now look like they do on windows (and linux, and everything else). Handy for web designers.

The back end is simply stunning, and while it won't produce massive changes right away, it is an amazing leap forward in multi-core technologies. These back end developments in SL will allow computers to get faster, faster (by truly taking advantage of multiple cores); and as developers start incorporating these technologies, even current multi-core systems will see a noticeable speed boost to everyday programs.

In summary, Snow Leopard does feel a bit more polished (colors look better in Finder, etc), Exposé is better, OS is speedier in general. Small things that really add up to make a difference. I am actually very glad that Apple chose to focus on the back end, and limited the front-end changes to tweaks and polishing.

categories: alaska nature