Day 266: Spooky Sky

2026-10-30Hello!A photo I took of a railway line above some trees and grass had incredible colors that made the landscape look alien. I wanted to explore more with that here, but it turned into a dive through color theory, deeper than I thought it would go.First, that alien color palette. Skies aren't supposed to be red! But infrared photography can filter out certain wavelengths of light at the sensor level. An editing trick here tries to emulate that output, but there's nothing like putting a calibrated filter over the sensor itself.Next, the color banding. Emanating outwards from the City Hall tower, curved lines of red break up the otherwise smooth gradient going towards the darker corners. I blame compression for this; not every color will be represented at an equal level, and for math reasons, it's easier to store blocks of a single color than record every color at every pixel.Those bands of color in the gradient of the sky aren't too noticeable, unless one also tints the…

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