First Pee-oh-Nee of the year..

[ottor]

Havent' done many flowers, but found this one bloomin' out in our garden and loved the colors - acceptable picture?

thanks,

 

[Gaerek]

My main criticism is to be aware of the lighting. The direct sunlight is very harsh and washes out a lot of color and casts some hard shadows. It's usually better to wait for a cloud to cover the sun, or even just wait for an overcast day to shoot flowers. You'll get better lighting and color in the flower.

Also, when you're shooting like this, you have to be very careful where you place the focus. The yellow inside of the flower isn't in focus, where I think that would be the best place to put it.

I do like the composition and the background, though opening up your aperture might give a more pleasing result for that. Unfortunately, that's the double edged sword of this kind of photography. Bigger aperture makes for a nicer background, but makes less of your subject in focus.

 

[KmH]

Havent' done many flowers, but found this one bloomin' out in our garden and loved the colors - acceptable picture?

thanks,

The image is a bit under exposed. Half a stop to be specific. That's about the limit of acceptable.

Gaerek had good comments. I'd like to add that virtually all digital images benefit from at least some post processing. I edited your image in 2 steps. I corrected the under exposure and did some dodge and burn after bumping the saturation a little.

Then I did some luminosity sharpening and some proprietary contrast adjustments.

This will show you where I dodged (made lighter) and burned (made darker):

 

[ottor]

That's awesome !! Did you also sharpen, or is that one effect that also comes from the D/Burn?

thanks....

 

[TAS4LIFE]

What program are you using to edit the pictures?

 

[KmH]

That's awesome !! Did you also sharpen, or is that one effect that also comes from the D/Burn?

thanks....

All the dodge and burn was on the first edit, sharpening was on the second edit only. Note the sharpening was done on a layer that was in the Luminosity blending mode, not normal. I used 2 passes of USM at 150 and a radius of 1.

What program are you using to edit the pictures?

I used 4 programs:

• Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) for the exposure correction and adjusting midtone contrast (Clarity slider).
• Adobe CS4 for the saturation adjustment, dodge/burn and sharpening
• Topaz Adjust 3 for the final contrast adjustments.
• and Imagenomic Noiseware Pro to reduce some luminosity noise.