Dark Flower

June 29, 2008 | Category: Flower, Image Processing

The weather is pretty poor today so I am spending it indoors. I’ve gone back to the shots I took at Beaumont Park a few weeks back to see if there were any good shots I could use. I’ve found a flower picture that has some potential.

This is the original shot from the camera.

Raw Flower Shot

I’ve shot this in RAW using my Canon 400D so before getting to photoshop I can tweak the camera settings a little. I’ve chosen the maximum level of sharpening, moved it to Photoshop and cropped it.

The crop places the flower on the right hand third, using the rule of thirds and cuts off the bottom of the two leaves that point towards the base of the flower, both of which help to place the focus on the flower itself instead of the surroundings.

Cropped and Sharpened

From this point I have a few choices. I can boost the colours a little and just make it pleasant or I can go for something darker. I choose the latter. To do this I have duplicated the layer in Photoshop and applied it using a multiply layer filter.

Multiplied

Now I need to re-balance the colours and ligthen the flower itself. I’ve done this using two hue and saturation adjustment layers, and a curves adjustment layers using the settings shown below: