Big Red

[Murtasma]

SHAZAM!

[Teewinot]

Wow...that really jumps out at you! I like it. The shadows on the individual petals are quite effective here (often I find shadows on flowers can be distracting). Did you do anything special (besides desaturating the background) to get this effect? Thanks for sharing!

[Murtasma]

Just some Shadow / Highlight tool on the flower then desaturating all the greens.

[Dazyl]

I love doing selective colorization, and this looks like it was a tough one. The reds are great -- not oversaturated (something I have some trouble with), and there's plenty of contrast.

However, some of the subject-flower's extreme edges are not colored, leaving an unfinished, "fuzzy" feeling -- particular in comparison with other edges, which are razor-sharp. Also, I've noticed when doing these that the first pass with the paintbrush-on-mask often only takes out one level of pixels. Some areas of your flower appear to be only partly exposed to the color level, making me wonder whether that's what happened here?

Of course, both of my observations could be deliberate on your part. Hard to know with these sometimes.

Edited: sigh.... disregard the above. For some reason, I thought it was a selective colorization. My bad...

[Murtasma]

Yeah I know what you mean, that would be my lens fault the area's were the line around the flower is not as sharp was because of the CA that I get when using a wide angele converter on my 18-55mm kit lens. Nothing I could really do unless I wanted to repaint some edges that had lots of purple and blue so instead I just masked the black and white layer over some of the edges a little. It happened a lot more at the top then the bottom of the flower were the DOF starts to drop off. Sometime soon I will get better medium zoom lens with less CA. I always run into this problem it's annoying. I deal with it however, it really destories HDR images tho.

[jiminyClickit]

Murtasma,

Help me get a sense of how you see things: did you consider (or try) a darker background?

[Murtasma]

Originally Posted by jiminyClickit

Murtasma,

Help me get a sense of how you see things: did you consider (or try) a darker background?

Ya know usually when I do black and white conversions I try all sorts of possabilites but, this time I just went straight for the greens I don't know why. Maybe it was the texture of the background that looked simliar to the flower that I wanted to keep it. However I would like to revisit this now due to your suggestion. I bet a darker background or maybe a flat black background would be even more powerful.

[jiminyClickit]

Murtasma,

Sure, red is a really dark hue. If it were b/w, you'd have a black flower. A darker b/g would help rose to "fit in" also.

[xxpinballxx]

I think thisone might be ral nice if it was just up against a plack background or a cloud layer as the black ground taken way down to almost black. Nice picture though the flower really makes you look! I think though it seems almost too photoshopped if that makes any sense. I think it looks as if the flower itself is from a different photo entirely