Hybrid Pitcher Plant

[Linda Dulak]

Today, Norm and I went to Longwood Gardens. I've tried many times to get a good photo of these pitcher plants. They are hanging plants and no matter which direction you try to photograph them you get terrible backgrounds. They are in a greenhouse portion of the conservatory and invariably the background shows parts of the glass, supporting structures, spots of bright light, etc. This time I had the assistance of my handy,dandy husband holding a print of an out of focus meadow behind the pitcher. No black background this time and no messy background! Finally, the beauty of this plant can show through. I absolutely love the little curlicue at the junction of the stem and the pitcher.

Nikon D7000, Nikkor 105 mm macro lens, ISO 400, f8.0, 1/60 sec, hand held
PP, levels, sharpening

Comments welcome

Linda

[Norm Dulak]

This is very nice, Linda.

Of the many photographic possibilities at Longwood Gardens, you selected a beauty.

Composition, exposure and sharpness are all excellent. The curly stem above the main structure of the plant adds elegance to the overall composition.

Thanks for sharing.

Norm

[Diane Miller]

You got great shot of an elegant subject! Good seeing! My only nit would be to have a look at lowering the saturation and looking at tweaks to the hue of the yellows/greens, or possibly a change in white balance/tint, or both. The very elegany subject feels a little overpowered.

This could be an elegant B/W, too, for the very interesting shapes.

[Paul Gustafson]

Beautiful shot!

[Jonathan Ashton]

Linda gorgeous flower..... but the background - its a bit too vivid for me!!:S3:

[OvidiuCavasdan]

Very interesting subject, well captured, I like the sharpness and details, good handheld technique. Agree the BG is a bit oversaturated but I also think this is about personal taste and can be tamed a bit if desired. So this is very nice!

[Linda Dulak]

Okay, I agree, the background is too vivid. The strange thing is that the background print that I used is a nice grass green but when photographed it turns yellow in the image. Changing the white balance in RAW doesn't correct it either. I was shooting in auto WB. Any idea why this is happening?

I used channel mixer on the selected background and desaturated the green and increased the blue a bit on the background to get a better color of green. But it's still much more yellow that the original background. But, it's better.

So what do you think now?

Linda

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Linda. A fascinating plant and well photographed! I agree about the background. (This happens to me all the time when I use green backgrounds.) Of the 2 versions, I prefer the first - mostly because the background (and the pitcher) of the repost is brighter than the OP. Once you have the background selected, I would suggest that you experiment with darkening and desaturating the background till you get something you like. This is a strong image and certainly worth a little extra work to get it just right! :S3:

[Diane Miller]

The camera can only guess at the colors and often gets it wrong when one colors is dominant. Go back to the raw file and try choosing a different camera profile to start with then tune from there. Selecting the BG and using channel mixer sounds like the hard way. You have now gotten a very bright saturated yellow where you had some pleasing darker areas in the original.

Try what you can do with WB in raw, then the HSL sliders. Then in PS if you need to do more, try Selective Color or Hue-Sat. A global adjustment should work as the camera's misinterpretation of the colors was global.

[Norm Dulak]

The camera can only guess at the colors and often gets it wrong when one colors is dominant. Go back to the raw file and try choosing a different camera profile to start with then tune from there. Selecting the BG and using channel mixer sounds like the hard way. You have now gotten a very bright saturated yellow where you had some pleasing darker areas in the original.

Try what you can do with WB in raw, then the HSL sliders. Then in PS if you need to do more, try Selective Color or Hue-Sat. A global adjustment should work as the camera's misinterpretation of the colors was global.

Thanks, Diane. You have suggested solutions to problems that have also vexed me in the past.

[Diane Miller]

Don't feel special, Norm.

I should have said the camera's interpretation of the colors combined with the raw converter's interpretation.

[Linda Dulak]

Thanks for the comments Diane. Are you implying that it's a very common problem that we should be working with in the raw conversion? And if so, what is the best way to proceed. I tried various white balances and they were worse than the one that used the auto white balance. Is this a specific problem with greens? Or are other colors involved as well. If you think those are heavily saturated yellows in the repost, you should have seen the original. It was basically completely yellow with a small area of green. I was trying to mimic the original background.

Is this a problem that vexes you as well? I see that Steve seems to have the same problem with green backgrounds. Yet, I see various photographers posting images using artificial backgrounds which are green. They do not seem to have a problem with this, yet I've had a lot of problems. Are we not getting the whole story on PP? I'd like to know.

Linda

[Diane Miller]

It's a combination of several things, which can vary from image to image. First, the more monochromatic the image, the more of a guess the camera has to make at the WB (Temp and Tint). Then the raw converter makes a further guess at WB. For LR/ACR the default camera profile (hidden in the last tab) is Adobe Standard. In many cases with Canon cameras reds and yellows can be too saturated, and I understand for Nikons there is often a problem with greens and blues.

I think this is why some people feel they don't like the colors with ACR. The fix is simply to choose the best profile (different for different images) and work from there as I suggested above. It's too bad ACR /LR have gotten a bad rap over this. It would be nice if they would make the camera profile choice more obvious.

And then on top of that there is the fact that different browsers show images differently, so when you post you can't be sure everyone is seeing what you are. You best hope is to convert to sRGB and be sure to embed the profile. (See my tutorial in the Educational Resources forum.) You did that here.

And then of course monitors can be a little different....

The best fix is the simplest -- go back to the basic things in raw first before resorting to fixes in PS.

[Linda Dulak]

Thanks Diane. I had investigated the camera profile and tried all the WB settings but wasn't happy with any of them. I'll go back and see about trying some of your other suggestions on processing.

Linda

[Diane Miller]

The WB presets are usually not good. Just use the temp and tint sliders after choosing a profile, then go to HSL.