Oh, the conceit of the art director. Mea culpa.
See where I went wrong.
Matteo Capaia, resident in Genoa, Italy, is the artist responsible for this beautiful image.
This is the screen capture of Matteo Capaia's manipulated Polaroid photo that caught my attention
The same image in Photoshop > Auto Color
-- a typical knee-jerk reaction to "improve" an image for reproduction
How to further meddle with the image.
Auto Color > Brightness -50 >Contrast +50
When in fact, this is what the creator of the image did, as he explains in his own words:
"Last month I worked on the same image, Adobe RGB space, balancing the red dominant with a precise point to point curve editing...I think the colors are very natural, soft-saturated and with a nice contrast.
I'm working in this direction. Knocking out the dominant it's the first thing for me to obtain a good image.
Then I printed the image with my epson 2100 on a Harman-Hahnemuhle 320gsm/ paper (previously I made a dedicated color profile with a Spectrocolorimeter) with a nice result....it seems a real transfer due to the bronzing effect on the paper. What do you think about it?"
I love it, and I am in self-imposed disgrace.
May the saints protect us from mindless art direction.