St John's Wort

[Ron Conlon]

Something different, a high key St John's Wort. I find it difficult to generate visual interest in yellow flowers because they are often monochromatic yellow, so I thought I would try a high key approach with this one. I don't feel real comfortable processing high key photos, so there was little adjustment on this one--I need to do more to figure out what works and what doesn't. I took shots with minor variants on flash placement and diffusion, and ended up liking this one because it had some directional lighting from the top right, in addition to the high key and some transparency for the inner parts of the petals.
In a lightbox with remote flash, tripod, D5100, 200mm f/18 1/200 ISO 100

[Diane Miller]

I like the general idea here but I wish for more definition in the flower -- they are lovely. I enjoy saturation, but if you look at the histogram here, the highlights are very blown out. I think you could have more detail in the yellows and still have a high key look, with different raw processing.

The first step would be to look at the different camera profiles, if the yellows in the raw file are blown out as it comes into the converter.

[Ron Conlon]

That's a good point Diane, I will try again on this one, probably starting from scratch, as I think most of the files were blown. Still flailing around a bit on the high key approach, think some recent ones are better, the SJW is still blooming so will give this one another go. Thanks as always for your tips and insights, you are always so helpful.

[Ron Conlon]

I found an exposure where the yellows weren't blown, and tried again.

[Diane Miller]

That's a better starting exposure but contrast is very low. Here's quick example of what I could pull out of the JPEG. A better job could be done with the raw file.

I probably went further than some people will like, but I wanted to show the potential.

[Ron Conlon]

I have to say Diane, I have never gotten that kind of contrast out of a yellow flower, despite many different types of manipulations. Was that from a luminosity curve?

[Diane Miller]

Nik Detail Extractor did 95% of it. Then a High Pass "sharpen" (put the layer in Overlay first so you can see how far to go). It is similar to Clarity in ACR/LR. Then a gentle Curve for contrast (normal mode) and then a soft quick mask brush into the center and another Curve (masked by the resulting selection) to bring up a little more contrast in the center.

But far better to do as much as possible in raw first, starting with the best camera profile.