Macro and Flora Image of the Week for the week ending February 15th, 2013: Jerry van Dijk - Sturt's desert pea
Congratulations Jerry!
From last years trip to Western Australia. You're looking down upon a flower head with 6 individual flowers. These flowers grow close to the ground, so I had a very cluttered BG. I ldecided to make the BG completely black, which was quite a challenge for the inside of the flower, while keeping all the small details. I tried various approaches, but the one that worked best was to select the center of the opening in the flower, quite far away from the edges and use the refine edge function to apply strong feathering. I then reduced the exposure until the center was all black. The feathering was just enough to leave the fine hairs and other details nearly untouched, while making the lighter BG between them more uniform to make it easier to select it. I then used the magic wand tool with very low tolerance (10-20) to make a new selection including the BG between the hairs and then further reduced the exposure to darken the BG. By repeating this proces a few times, I was finally able to darken the BG even between the fine details, without compromising them. I did some selective color work to manage the reds and selectively reduced the exposure on the protruding bulges of the flowers which reflected the sunlight.
I know not all of you are fond of flowers againts a completely dark BG, but in this case, this was the only way to make an appealing image and the details and symmetry on the flower head made this worthwhile to keep it for me.
Macro and Flora Image of the Week for the week ending February 15th, 2013: Jerry van Dijk - Sturt's desert pea
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