Purple Iris

[Julie Kenward]

It's the Iris Festival weekend at our local botanical gardens but there were only a handful of iris that cooperated with the garden's plans. Most are still tucked away inside their protective cocoons but this one came out to greet us!

I smoothed out the little bit of uneveness in the BG with the paint brush/soft brush/30% opacity technique. It wasn't that there was anything all that distracting - I thought the purple iris was so pretty it deserved to have the attention all to itself.

Canon 40D, EF 400mm f/5.6L (I was taking photos of birds at the hummingbird feeders when I found this jewel!)
f5.6 @ 1/125th, ISO 200, light shade
Manual mode, pattern metering, Daylight WB
Handheld, no flash

[Cheryl Flory]

what gorgeous deep blossom color! great background, even what seems to be a slight glow around the petals.
I miss not being able to see the details on the foreground petal, or is that just my monitor?

If you wanted to lighten that front petal, how would you do that without losing any of the intensity of the color of the rest of the blossom??

[Hazel Grant]

It is so hard to get the dark ones especially to have the right contrast so they don't look like a big dark clump. Well done!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Julie Kenward]

Cheryl, there are a few ways you can lighten/darken a specific area. The best known is to use something like the quick selection tool in CS4 and grab only that area, then use levels or curves to adjust that specific area. A 2nd way would be to duplicate the layer (Cntl +J) and use a different blend mode - 'multiply' mode to darken and 'screen' mode to lighten. Then you would adjust the level of opacity to get that one area where you want it and then use the brush tool with the FG color set to black to erase all the rest of the image except that petal. There are also specific actions you can download (Paint with Light is one of my favorites) and it lets you lighten or darken specific areas using the brush tool. And then there's my REAL favorite - the software by Nik called "Viveza 2". It blows all the other stuff away. You open it inside Photoshop, set a marker for the area you want to lighten or darken, move a slider and voila! It's wonderful!

Hazel, backlighting & sidelighting works wonders to lighten the deepest purple petals - that's what I've used here. That's why that front petal is a bit darker - it's the side most in the shade.

[Christopher Miller]

Hi Jules, Love the deep purple against that nice green BG. Very lovely. :) I like the comp and the bit of glow around the flower, but I do see an obvious halo on the right side of the front petal that I would remove. I might also the tone down the bright area on the bud a little.

[Bob Miller]

Hi Julie....beautiful clean bg for a beautiful subject. I agree i would like to see more detail in that front petal if possible and the bright part of the bud is very distracting. Also what is the opacity technique you mentioned for smoothing out the bg...worked very well!

[Anita Bower]

Jules: I agree with the comments above. Would like that front petal to be a bit lighter, remove halo, darken lower bud. The color is stunning, and the BG exquisit! As always, thank you for explaining your techniques. I have a folder of pp techniques from you!!

[Ken Childs]

I agree with the comments already made but wouldn't mind if the entire flower was as dark as that front petal.

I have some of this variety. It's called Midnight and the pics on the package made it look like it was going to be a black flower. I was disappointed when they turned out to be dark purple, only because I already had this variety.

[Julie Kenward]

Okay, I tried to lighten the petal but it really doesn't have much detail to begin with. I toned down the bud more (I had toned it down the first time, too...just not quite enough!) Was the halo down near the stalk? That's the only one I could see so I went back and cloned over it again.

Bob, The technique I referred to is this:

I selected the main flower, bud and stalk with one of the selection tools in PS (I used the quick selection tool this time but any of them will work.) I then went up to the menu and chose select/inverse. What this does is allows you only to be able to paint on everything BUT the flower, the stalk and the buds. In each quadrant of the photograph I use the eyedropper tool to grab one of the shades of green that I think will blend the harsher darker and lighter tones together - something as close to the middle tone as I can find. That loads that color into the FG box at the bottom of the toolbox. Now I grab the brush tool, make sure it's on a soft brush setting, lower the opacity to somewhere between 20-50% (I usually end up around 30%) and lightly "paint" over the BG going right up to the selected border. Remember, because of the inversion it won't let you go over the actual flower - those marching ants will keep the paint on only the BG area.

I move around the BG usually painting in the direction of the items in the BG to kind of blend them all together. In this case there were a few slightly darker diagonal stems so I painted diagonally with the direction they were going and blended them right into the BG. I could have chosen a lower opacity and left some of them showing through but, in this case, I chose to blend them out.

Hope that helps explain the technique. Someone else here at BPN taught it to me and I love it - it's so much faster than cloning when you have a big area to cover and you want to blend instead of totally eliminate something.

[Julie Brown]

Hi Jules. Great color and BG. I like the repost. You pulled enough detail from that center line to make the darkest petal less distracting. Thanks for explaining your process. I would like to try to do some of this, and I think Elements would have some of the same tools.

[Anita Bower]

Jules: Thanks for the explanation of painting the bg. I like the repost with the slightly lighter petal. The light bud still bothers me and I don't think darkening it is the solution. I did a quick clone and brush here--don't know if it is an improvement or not.

[Julie Kenward]

Anita, nice try! I think it's a little blurry for my tastes but I do like the final tone you came up with. Maybe I need to try painting over that one area with a deeper tone of brown. Thanks for the idea!

[Anita Bower]

Anita, nice try! I think it's a little blurry for my tastes but I do like the final tone you came up with. Maybe I need to try painting over that one area with a deeper tone of brown. Thanks for the idea!
Jules: I knew it was risky to do a quick clone job on the image of the clone queen. :-) Just wanted to give you the idea.

[Bob Miller]

Thanks Julie for your technique. I just printed it off and will be using it! Thanks so much!

[Jonathan Ashton]

Jules I am also eternally grateful for your processing tips, they have given me new ideas and I hope to employ them on a regular basis. I have made a modification of your iris, I used some of your processing tips along with a few of my own - hope you like it.