What a difference a background makes.

Had an interesting thing happen in my CSLR entry, Streetlight. I wanted a diagonal crop to emphasize the centered-ness of the photo but of course you can't post diagonal crops on the typical web page so I put it on a grey background that was close to the CSLR background color. Initial I got a few comments that didn't like the crop, saying it was awkward. After showing it to Alma she said it was because the backgrounds didn't match so it looks like some dorky frame around the pic. So I set out to match the background, digging into the page's .css file to find the background RGB values (38,38,38) but photoshop skewed the colors when I converted the image to SRGB so I had to revert to the tweak and test method and eventually found 42,42,42 were the right values - reposting the comments all change on how nice the crop was. You can see the difference in just these two blog entries. - and the pic is currently in 1st place in the 1st day of voting - thanks Mama!