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Jerry van Dijk
02-10-2013, 04:36 PM
From last years trip to Western Australia. You're looking down upon a flower head with 6 individual flowers. These flowers grow close to the ground, so I had a very cluttered BG. I ldecided to make the BG completely black, which was quite a challenge for the inside of the flower, while keeping all the small details. I tried various approaches, but the one that worked best was to select the center of the opening in the flower, quite far away from the edges and use the refine edge function to apply strong feathering. I then reduced the exposure until the center was all black. The feathering was just enough to leave the fine hairs and other details nearly untouched, while making the lighter BG between them more uniform to make it easier to select it. I then used the magic wand tool with very low tolerance (10-20) to make a new selection including the BG between the hairs and then further reduced the exposure to darken the BG. By repeating this proces a few times, I was finally able to darken the BG even between the fine details, without compromising them. I did some selective color work to manage the reds and selectively reduced the exposure on the protruding bulges of the flowers which reflected the sunlight.
I know not all of you are fond of flowers againts a completely dark BG, but in this case, this was the only way to make an appealing image and the details and symmetry on the flower head made this worthwhile to keep it for me.

D7000, Nikkor 200mm micro, hh, Iso-400, f/10, 1/320 sec, -0.7 EV. ACR6.7/CS5.

Jonathan Ashton
02-11-2013, 11:19 AM
Jerry you put in lot of work and it paid off. I really like the exposure and colours and you also have excellent detail. I am not generally a fan of black backgrounds but in this case I think it works very well indeed. There is an area of reflection the right hand side of the flower, you may wish to consider some cloning or patching.
I am being a little hypercritical here but there does appear to be some ghosting around the black triangular shaped areas, perhaps a little too much feathering?

Jerry van Dijk
02-14-2013, 02:39 PM
Thanks Jon! I think the gosthing is just sloppy work from my side.... The edge between the flower parts and the lighter BG, however, was quite blurry due to the quick falloff of DOF, so it isndifficult to get a really sharp edge ubless you eat away a bit of the flower part.

Bob Miller
02-17-2013, 03:07 PM
Hi Jerry....I like the sharp details and the symmetry in this flower head. The black bg was handled exceedingly well and the reds look good!. Congrats on a fine image!

Dave Leroy
02-19-2013, 04:16 PM
A very unique looking plant. Well composed and lovely color. The flashy highlights do draw the eye and if mine I would be inclined to clone away. A really good idea on the blck bg.