Azalea snowcone

[Jerry van Dijk]

As promised in Anita's post, another white on white (sorry Ed). We had quite a lot of snow just before Christmas. The leaves of the azalea in my backyard had just the right shape to support a nice snowcone! I zoomed in on one and used the snow on the lawn as BG.
I do think the snow on the azalea leaves does not stand out from the BG enough. I tried various contrast adjustments, but without much success. Any PP advice that may help is very welcome! (I hope Ed is still ignoring everyone, so he won't suggest to just paint it black :D).

Panasonic DMC-FZ18, handheld, 22 mm (132 mm eq.), ISO-100, F/4.5, 1/60 sec, EC +1.4, pattern metering, aperture priority, RAW.
RAW processing in Silkypix, PP in Corel Photopaint. Exposure, white balance adjustment (7000k), levels and sharpness. Full frame.

[Julie Kenward]

Jerry, I have two suggestions for you.

First, you have a pretty strong blue cast to the snow. You might try to bring that down with either a hue/saturation layer or use levels "auto" or eyedroppers to correct the cast (assuming you want to. I do realize some images are bluer for a reason.)

Next, try using the lasso tool to go around the snow in the azalea and then do select/inverse so everything but the snow on the plant is selected. Now open a levels adjustment and slide the midtone or even black slider to get that part of the image to drop in lightness just a tiny bit and that should help separate the BG from the bit of snow you are trying to highlight.

Lovely composition and there is so much promise here...just needs a few tweaks to get that separation you are going for!

[Jerry van Dijk]

Hi Jules, thanks for the advice! I fixed the blue cast by adjusting the white balance in the RAW file to 9000k. The lasso tool had even more difficulty in discerning the FG snow from the BG snow than I did, so I ended up painting on the mask using a small brush and then followed your steps. I still ended up with a halo, so I increased contrast using levels on the whole image, pushing it a little further on the dark side than I normally would. To not waste my efforts in creating the mask, I selectively sharpened the subject a little more to make it stand out, inverted the mask and applied noise removal to the BG. Here's how it turned out.

[Julie Kenward]

You did it! Nice pp work, Jerry!

[Vida van der Walt]

I really like these white on white images. Love the "snow cone" and a great opportunity for a shot well spotted Jerry. I like the simplicity of this and find it striking. Great repost and advice by Jules.:)

[Mike Moats]

Hey Jerry, very cool comp, like the second post with the whiter snow. Good sharp details.

[Anita Bower]

I'm getting to this a bit late. The second version is good. The snow cone now stands out from the white BG. (Isn't Jules wonderful?) Well done. I like this "different" snow image! What a great idea.

[Jerry van Dijk]

Thanks all, and special thanks to Anita for posting those white on whites, which inspired me to pick this one up again and try to fix the problems.