Saw this thing at the Botanical Gardens yesterday and thought it looked cool. Natural light (clouds, shade). I really love how this turned out. I expect a rather crappy score for this in the Expert Free Study, but I just have to put it in.
Shot in RAW: adjusted white balance, exposure
save as 16-bit PSD
PS:
Crop
NI
Curves
Very minor cloning and blurring
Black & White
Flatten
Convert to Greyscale, then 8-bit, then duotone with blue/black, then back to RGB
Brought a B/W layer back under the duotone layer
Convert Duotone layer to Overlay at 68%
Selective Color to tone down the super bright whites
Resize
Sharpen
Border
Save for Web
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Well, it's always nice to get an image to critique that is well done. I get to look at a good piece and get to say nice things.
It's beautifully composed in the frame, and the monotone treatment gives it the austerity you undoubtedly were trying for. The beautifully blurred background acts as a nice foil to the starkness of the main attraction. If it was mine, I'd probably try to get all the stem sharp. But I don't know if that would be an 'improvement'; just different.
In any event you have a nice image here and your score wasn't that crappy.
Thank you for putting it in despite what you expected it to score (and it ended up not doing too badly at all - check that commenter score!) Excellent. Very nice processing, too - thanks for sharing the details.
this is nice, has a very cold, isolated feel to it. The only thing I would perhaps change would be to clone out the annoying blob that looks like lens flare (or part of the background) to the right of the stalk as it is quite distracting.
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