What’s Your Preference?

peeperita · #1 (**permalink**) 10-05-2008, 07:47 PM

the before shot...

and after....

i liked how this daisy looked like it had fists up, ready for a fight.... it was sharp enough to work with but the colors were kinda flat and the exposure was a little under.....

the first couple of things i did i do to about 95% of my shots....i did a small levels adjustment on a layer, minor cloning of a white thing in the uppermost bloom, and then a sharpening layer using the high pass technique wulf describes here....

that really made the image nice and sharp and saturated....but, never being able to say when, i decided to play around with a technique i've been using lately to lighten or darken areas with layers of highly diffused black or white brushes and set to a blending mode....

i thought i would try to see if i could add some visual depth to the center bloom ......i took a sample of the color of the center, which was this darkish reddish brown......applied it with a small soft brush 30 pixels wide around where the petals meet the center in a circle......i then applied a gaussian blur of around 50 pixels until the brown lost all of it's distinct edges......i set this layer to overlay and adjusted the opacity.....this threw a dark "halo" around the center of the blossom and i felt like it made the petals look as if they were "flexing" outward....

i liked it so much, i applied the same technique to the other flowers with the same color.....it didn't really make them "bend" so much as i just liked the bounce of that rust through the image......

thanks for looking....

peeper

p.s.......after previewing this post, i realised i did do a couple more things......there's a vignette and an area down around the bottom edge where i placed swatches of color to cover up some distractions....

dlaf · #2 (**permalink**) 10-05-2008, 10:31 PM

Quite a nice way to brighten the daisy! I had not noticed the "arms" of the daisy until you mentioned it, but then was reminded of the animated character "Daisy" from the children's cartoon, "Oswald." I went searching and searching to find a decent image, but this is the best I could do. I also keep seeing a crown (maybe a boxing champion's crown?) on your daisy. I need to keep reading your workflow here for some interesting pointers. Thanks!

Debbie