How often does this happen to you? You shoot 100 photos at an important event and discover that the very best shot of the day is useless for one reason or another. It’s way out of focus or 2 stops overexposed or – as in this case – something totally unexpected has happened. Something like… a light leak? What the…?

Certainly not caused by the camera, this leak must have occurred when I pulled the film OUT of the camera. Unbelievable! Fortunately I had taken two shots of this scene, and with the help of PhotoShop, was able to create a perfect image from an otherwise unusable one.

Geeky stuff follows…

The original image with both layers is 986,342,974 bytes in size – just shy of one gigabyte. Manipulating an image this size – dust-spotting, color-correcting, and merging the new forground over the old – took about four hours on my lowly 2.4 gigahertz machine with one gigabyte of RAM. Just saving the image took about 10 minutes. On the plus side, PhotoShop 7.0 performed flawlessly, and my friends now have an image that they can print at least 4 feet wide with amazing clarity. On the down side, I think it may be time to upgrade my hardware. I have my eye on a G5 with a 30″ monitor, but who am I kidding? It’ll never happen. Wait, I know! I’ll add it to my wish-list… 🙂