Shadows and Highlights

I’ve always liked this photo, both because of its very flat depth of field and also because of the lighting – a special hue because of the rain and because, well, because, this is France (it’s not an accident that most Impressionist painting was done in France, with its nearly supernatural light).

But the slide (in this case Kodachrome II, which accounts for the wide aperture setting that produced the out of focus background) never seemed bright enough to me, despite the wet glow of the highlights.

But hats off to Photoshop CS3, with its sophisticated and automatic Shadow/Highlight tool: