Azalia

[John Robinson]

Varigated Leaved Azalia
D7100
Sigma 50 mm macro
100 ISO
25th sec @f 5
10 stacked images in Combine ZP
Slight crop
Curves in Paintshop Pro 7
Sharpen only for web>
Cheers
JohnR

[Allen Sparks]

Hi John,
Nice job with the focus stacking - all looks crisp to me. I like the BG too - was it natural? Lovely image.
Allen

[Jonathan Ashton]

Nicely presented subject, DOF looks good. Purely from a personal aesthetic point of view I find the flowers a bit busy, my eye doesn't readily settle but that is of course the feature of the azalea - colours look OK but screen not calibrated at present.

[John Robinson]

Thanks both .
Always hard when its a bunch of flowers in a clump - and hard to separate one or two without spoiling the plant. Good stacking excuse though!
JohnR

[John Robinson]

Allen
Sorry - forgot to reply to you.
Hard to annswer !!
Its a natural backgound photographed in the garden. Then printed A3 on matte papere and used as a background!!. So its natural to start with and then not !!
Cheers
John

[Diane Miller]

Semi-natural BG is wonderful! The reds are very low in contrast though, and too much red creeping into the leaves and stems. Should be fixable.

[John Robinson]

Diane
Will have a play later thanks
John
PS Will be tricky as the stems are red.

[John Robinson]

Diane
Had a play. Must admit - I dont like the flower colour at all.
Can't get it right.
John

[Diane Miller]

I agree -- red tonalities are not at all right here. What should be the darker areas inside the blossoms have gone too light and blown out. I'll see if I can suggest something later but no time now. Anything would really involve going back to the unadjusted capture to do it best.

[Diane Miller]

For starters just do a simple Levels and do an Auto adjust -- on the original. That will make the flowers better and get rid of the red stems.

[John Robinson]

Diane Posts must have criossed.
This is the original on auto
Piuty about the stems as they are red
Cheers
John

[Diane Miller]

Stems may be red but should leaves be pinkish / brownish? But you're the judge of how it should look! It just looks odd to me.

Is it a new JPEG capture or an old film shot? If film, slide or neg?

[Adhika Lie]

I have a lot to learn from this photo. I prefer the flowers' tonality on Pane #11 but the BG has an odd cyan cast to it. I am following this thread to keep up with the discussion. Thanks for sharing this work, John.

[John Robinson]

Hi Diane/Adhika
Its the original un touched except re sized for the forum. I took several other series so I,ll have a look. I think I,ll just bin it and try something else :bg3:
John

[Diane Miller]

My comment in the Crassula thread about getting accurate color would apply here, too. Of course, with a very 3D subject like this, you might possibly be getting reflected colors that are "tainting" some parts differently. For instance, if the plant was sitting on a colored tablecloth or light was bouncing off colored walls or the like.

[Anita Bower]

I think reds and Azaleas are both challenging to photograph, so you have double difficulty here. The flowers are lovely, as is the shape of the group. Good job with focus stacking; all the flowers are in focus.

I think the reds are too saturated in the OP. When I checked levels, the reds were out of bounds. I lowered the saturation of reds, magentas, and maybe some other color. I desaturated the bg a bit using Sponge tool. I did several Levels adjustments and lowered brightness and contrast. The question is whether this image looks like the flowers themselves, or, the way you want it to look.

[Diane Miller]

Anita, this is a difficult image and I think your version is an improvement, but I'm not sure I see what I'd call saturation in the reds. I'm curious, when you opened the OP in PS, you should have gotten a warning that there is no profile (John's software doesn't give him the option to attach one). In answer to the choices in that message, you should answer to Assign sRGB (this is a case where you do assign a profile) because John does submit the images as sRGB, just not tagged with the profile. And then be sure to check the box to convert to your working space. Only then will you see the histogram correctly. See my tutorial in Educational Resources on When the Histogram is Wrong.

Reds are flat, but not blown. The correct histogram is above.

I think the main issue is that the red and green channels have low contrast. Look at the Channels palette in PS to see the dramatic difference in the centers of the flowers. Then go to the color channels in Levels or Curves and move the left slider in for Red and Green to improve things somewhat.

[Anita Bower]

Diane:

There was no notice when I opened the OP.

I have followed your instructions and assigned sRGB. There is no box to convert to my working space. Can't I just work with sRGB? Or do you want me to convert it to RGB?

What do you mean by "correct" histogram? I confess that I never look at the histogram when processing my images. The top histogram is the one for the OP after assigning it the sRGB profile. It looks to me as if there is too much red. The bottom histogram is of the image I posted above. It looks similar to your "correct" histogram.

[Diane Miller]

I don't see where the first histogram came from, as it is not the correct one. Possibly your software is set to choose to ignore the profile and in that case it will use your monitor profile. That is doubly wrong.

Go to Edit > Color Settings and follow the instructions in the tutorial in Educational Resources here on When the Histogram is Wrong. That warning is very important and setting it is so simple.

If you are using sRGB as your working space in PS, you may not get the checkbox to convert to your working space as it will already be there when you choose sRGB. sRGB is the default PS working color space but Adobe RGB is better if you ever print things.

"RGB" is not a color space. It is a color model, like LAB or several others. The relevant working color spaces for photography are sRGB, Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB.

Read the tutorials -- they are my best effort at explaining this stuff. If something isn't clear let me know -- I'm happy to rewrite!

[Diane Miller]

To try to clarify a little more -- if you never changed the default, sRGB is your PS working space. That's the simplest from a workflow standpoint. But i don't understand where your initial histogram came from. The image was in sRGB but not tagged and should have given you a warning that no profile was attached. That doesn't mean there isn't one -- there always is, but the software needs to know what it is to display the histogram correctly. The colors may or may not be displayed correctly, depending on your choices to answer a profile mismatch or a missing profile in Edit > Color Settings.

The histogram is a light and color meter on steroids. It is reliable way above any monitor, when the image is correctly color managed. I refer to it constantly.

[Anita Bower]

Diane: Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Lots for me to learn.