wild geranium

[Ron Conlon]

D5100 tripod 200mm 1/200s f/20 inside a white box with background and remote flash.
These are found in the woodlands, but these were from my backyard: the nearby Nature Center sells indigenous plants in an annual sale.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Beautiful image I like the composition and the soft colours. We have similar plants over here but they are mostly blue in colour. I think the DOF is about optimal most items are sharp and where they are not they form a nice containment to the image. As I said I like the image as it is, it may be worthwhile seeing what it is like just a tad less bright and a little bit more contrast.

[Ron Conlon]

Thanks, Jon. This should be bluer too, shouldn't have let that slip.

[Ron Conlon]

Jon, recently I have stopped increasing contrast in post on flower macros with the goal of keeping everything in gamut. I have for some time recently wondered how to avoid out-of-gamut colors in flower photos. Currently, I first check the histogram in ACR to make sure exposure is bang on with nobody cut off at the high end. If there are colors which threaten to end up out of gamut in processing, I may set the camera profile to camera neutral in ACR, then import to PS. At that point, everything is usually in gamut. Then, I can view the out-of-gamut areas in the course of further post-processing. What I have found is that most methods of increasing contrast (curves, usually) often take significant portions of the photo out of gamut. At that point, I can ask myself whether I care about it in those portions of the photo--but lately I have been trying to keep everything in. I have also fallen out of the habit of masking for selectively applying changes--I would rather reshoot than spend a lot of time in post, and with the setup I have been using recently and quickly checking the results on the laptop, reshooting isn't a big deal. It definitely results in less contrast, but I think that is fine for most flowers.

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Ron. You are really getting good at these lightbox flower images! This is outstanding in all respects! My only comment is that there is a dust spot in the background - that would take about 3 seconds to fix. :S3: