Flower with raindrops by Alastair by dprchallenges


01-JUN-2005	Alastair Norcross

I like the way this flower has an almost parchment-like texture to it, which contrasts with the smoothness of the raindrops.

Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel
1/200s f/13.0 at 100.0mm iso200 with Flash hide exif

other sizes: small medium original auto

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Guest		26-Aug-2005 06:45
Alastair, all the effort was worth it. Very cool result! Have you ever tried NeatImage or Noise Ninja to cut down on noise in images? Gaussian blur is ok, but can be tricky at boundaries with detailed elements of the image. I find selectively applying NI can be quite useful for some images that don't look too bad in Photoshop, but when compressing into JPEGs can create all kinds of ugly detail in areas I thought were relatively free of detail. Of course, then there are those high ISO or smaller sensor camera images that are just plain noisy and can benefit from noise reduction if done properly. John

dprchallenges		26-Aug-2005 03:05
This is the last version, I promise! I reprocessed the RAW as a 16-bit Tiff, and did all the processing (Provia action, S-curve, sharpening) on the 16-bit version to cut down on the artifacting problem.I also applied some gaussian blur to the background, and then converted to 8-bit mode and saved as Jpeg. Alastair

Guest		25-Aug-2005 23:22
Good one Alastair. Perhaps a bit more saturated than I would have decided to go and the green area is showing some obvious JPEG artifacting, but this is a lot more dramatic than your understated original. Well done. Good entry. John

Dennis Phillips		25-Aug-2005 14:28
An outstanding image, and a wonderful lesson from you and John on the use of curves. Thanks to both of your. Tlaloc

dprchallenges		25-Aug-2005 12:49
Hi John, I use curves all the time, I just misunderstood what you meant by 'vibrancy'. For this latest version, I kept the Provia action, because I like the richer colours, and added my standard S-curve, which is quite similar to the one you used. Thank you for the suggestion. Now that I look at it, I also prefer the brighter version.

Guest		25-Aug-2005 10:37
Alastair, not exactly what I had in mind, but fear not, I can show you what I mean. I hope you don't mind, but I put some stuff in a new Scratchpad Gallery to show what you did and what I meant, with histograms, curves and images: http://www.pbase.com/dprchallenges/macro7_textures_scratchpad Hopefully that will explain it a lot better than me rambling on in this thread. If you don't use curves, then you can use levels instead for a somewhat similar effect. I hope I'm not just telling you stuff you already know, but your reprocessing made me think you're really across histograms/curves/levels, which are fundamentals in digital image processing. My apologies if I misread the situation. John

dprchallenges		25-Aug-2005 03:06
OK John, I followed your suggestion and enhanced the image some more. I ran a Provia action, and then used the multiply mode with a duplicate layer at 30% opacity. Alastair

Guest		24-Aug-2005 13:12
Alastair, I wasn't sure from the thumbnail what I was going to think about this one, but I was very pleased to see what opened up in the full image and I agree with your comment. This one might respond well to a boost through curves for some added vibrancy. However, good entry. John