As you may recall, some friends of ours acquired a cockapoo puppy a couple of weeks ago. As it turns out, their daughter, who clearly has more refined taste in pets, acquired a cat several months ago. She lives in New York with her husband, and that’s where I was last week—so naturally I visited them. Just as naturally, I didn’t miss my chance to take pictures of Tony the cat (named after the Tony awards, I assume).
Now, this was an odd photo session. When I returned home and looked at the pictures, the color balance was all over the map. Some shots were way too red, some were way too green, and others I couldn’t even categorize. Photoshop’s color balance tool didn’t really seem to correct things entirely, so I had to play around a lot to get a color that seemed like it matched my memory of Tony, who is a beautiful and sociable orange cat. Here he is on the bed, with the lights of the city twinkling behind him:
And here’s what Tony looks like when you see the whole cat. This is not a great picture, but it’s not too bad considering how low the light was. I did my best to fiddle around until the color of Tony’s fur was fairly close to the top picture.
Finally, if you’re curious what I mean about wildly varying white balance, here’s a digital proof sheet of the whole photo shoot:
Some of these may look like they’re actually differences in exposure, but Photoshop doesn’t lie. Even when the exposures were corrected, there were still big differences in color balance. I’ve never run into such dramatic changes in color balance in a single set of pictures taken in the same place, so I’m really not sure what was going on.