I am guessing there will be a lot of flower close ups. I also took some of those, but was never really all that happy with them. Flower closeups are so overdone that even the macro mode on cameras is normally a flower, and I really wanted something to stand out. Thus, I needed some type of cool bokeh, dramatic lighting, or a more interesting location. Lighting was pretty much out due to overcast skies most of the week (and especially when I had available time). I did get some ok bokeh shots (See //www.flickr.com/photos/giantmike13/5719578113/). But the flowers were never quite prominent enough.
So Sunday I went to the local botanical gardens hoping for more interesting opportunities. Much to my chagrin, the high winds as of late has beat up the flowers and the cold weather has kept bloom under wraps. But, there were some things coming up, so I looked for scenes. To my surprise, I found a couple, including this one that seemed to work out nicely. This would have been a great HDR shot, but being basic I worked to get as good of an exposure as I could (not blowing out the sky too much), and went on my way.
Back home in post processing is where the magic happened. The overcast skies (again) made the lighting less than stellar, so I needed to add some extra pop. Below is how I did that.
I'm curious to see how many DNMC votes/comments I get. Notice that the description says "the topic is Flowers." Then later it says "find the perfect subject...and show us flowers." There is nothing in the description that says flowers need to be the subject :)
Post Processing:
* Chromatic Aberration
* Increase Brightness
* Recovery
* Highlights and Shadows
* Topaz DeNoise
* Topaz Adjust
* Increase Black Point
* Increase contrast
* Increase saturation with lower vibrancy
* Pull up curve a bit
* Increase shadows slightly
* Levels
* Color adjustments
* Export as TIFF
* Resize
* Slight Edge Sharpening
* Save as JPEG
Statistics
Place: 96 out of 220 Avg (all users): 5.5060 Avg (commenters): 7.3750 Avg (participants): 5.2530 Avg (non-participants): 5.7529 Views since voting: 732 Views during voting: 278 Votes: 168 Comments: 9 Favorites: 0
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