Theme: Carnivorous Pitcher Plant

[Wendy Kates]

This is a carnivorous pitcher plant which, in case you don't know, eats insects! My understanding is that it's rim and and sides are very slippery, attracting and trapping insects. Once the insects are trapped in the water inside the "pitcher", they die, and their decay releases digestive nutrients for the plant. These plants were growing in sphagnum moss, which had turned red with the season. The moss was very chaotic, filled with all sorts of extraneous branches and leaves that distracted from the plants. So I used a lot of cloning and content aware to remove them...hence the somewhat repetitious nature of the moss, especially in the upper right corner of the image. I didn't do much additional processing, other than increasing brightness and contrast, so the post-processing isn't exactly OOTB, but it went with the theme, so I posted it. (And whoever heard of a carnivorous plant...that's OOTB!) Comments and suggestions welcome.

[Diane Miller]

Very nice! I'd touch up the cloning repeats -- patterns like that really stand out to our eyes. Small spots can be sampled and dropped in to break up the most obvious patterns. It can also help to use one of the jagged brush shapes.

Sometimes the healing brush set very small can work better than cloning. Or for a few of the pieces you want to remove, would it work to change the green color to red?

[Nancy Bell]

Pitcher plants are indeed super cool! For so much clean-up work it might be easiest to do some "gardening" around the subject while still out in the field. I have seen these plants and the area around them is indeed full of lots of misc. stuff. So ideas for this image could be to blur the bkgd, or maybe overlay a texture. The pitcher plants themselves have nice composition and good details, as well as that great red.

[Dennis Bishop]

The size of the pitcher plants, the strong diagonal they form, and their difference in color relative to the background do a lot to isolate them from the background.

Coincidentally, I just started reading a book on the use of visual intensity in composition. One of the points made early in the book is about finding the right degree of intensity -- enough to attract the viewer and make the subject apparent without making the energy level of the image too high. At least that's what I took away from it.

I'd suggest blurring the background some for two reasons. It would compete less with the pitcher plants, and it would reduce the highlights. The slipperiness of the plants is important so I wouldn't want to eliminate the highlights there. To my surprise, I was able to tame them a bit with Select>Color Range followed by Content Aware Fill and still retain a slippery feel.

[Anita Bower]

I love carnivorous plants! They have marvelous and unusual shapes. These Pitcher Plants are slightly different in shape than the one's I'm familiar with.
You could tone down the reds using Levels.
I think this subject would have benefited from being photographed in shade, not harsh sun. If I don't have a diffuser handy, I use my body, someone else's body, my had, etc.

[Wendy Kates]

Thank you, Diane, Nancy, Dennis and Anita, for your input. I will rework the image with your suggestions. Anita...I definitely agree about the harsh sun....there were five of us, and we were on a boardwalk so there wasn't a lot of room for maneuvering, but it would have been relatively easy for someone to hold up their hand in front of the sun. Next time....