OK, saw all your beautiful flowers on white backgrounds, and gave it a try. I really don't like mine. It is, at best, flat and boring.
I have no more of these blossoms, but I did just get a white lily to try again, but what should I do differently? I've seen it done. but obviously, missed the boat on this one.
Hi Cheryl,
Many ways to go high key....one is to purposefull over expose and others can be done in PP'ing.....so as Jules suggested.....let us know what more you did and let's see if we can help!
Thanks,Mike. I like the background, I like how the top petal melts into the background, and I like the bits of details in the petal. But to me, the blossom just doesn't seem "alive" or interesting. Perhaps it is the position of the flower?
Roman and Julie, what I did was in RAW was clarity +67, Contrast +25, brightness +50, Highlights -14, Lights +46, Darks +45, Shadow +97. Then in ps I darkened the neutrals a lot to bring back some of the details in the petals.
Hi Cheryl. I have no idea how to do these white on white shots but I think you did very well here. I wonder if lightening the two grey shadows on top will be an improvement?
my suggestion is to continue to experiment when you have a chance. try diffused light to get soft shadows and less difference between lights and darks. try to reflect some light into the dark areas, such as where the pistils and stamen come out. try turning the flower to see how different positions affect the light.
if you want to do a lot of post processing, you might read the steps used by people over in out of the box for the white on white challenge. or, you could desaturate a photo such as this one, and then apply a subtle tone. i sometimes use the selective color aadjustment layer to whiten up the whites.
in this image, i would rotate the flower a bit so it doesn't look like it is falling over (some of my cyclamen photos suffer from this. i'm not surre what more to do about the blown out and shadowed parts.
i hope you continue to experiment and let us see what you come up with. :)
Cheryl, from what I just read on your RAW adjustments you are really stretching that image! I usually try not to make more than a +/- 10-15 on any one setting in 99% of the different sliders. Here's what I would do differently:
As Roman said, you can overexpose in camera. Try a +1 exposure, a +1-1/2, and a +2 and watch for blinkies in the histogram. Even though you want to overexpose you do NOT want to lose the detail by going too far to the right on the histogram. This should help you in RAW to not have to do such huge tweaks to the image.
Another way to go with this particular image would be to go back into RAW and reset everything to default (just double click each slider - I believe that is what resets everything.) Now convert the image to black and white while still in RAW but don't use the b&w screen to set the tones...go back to the first tab and use those top sliders to move your black and white points to where you like them. Then, as Anita mentioned, export the image to PS and maybe add a photo filter or turn it into a duotone by adding another tone to the black and white. (I did a tutorial on duotones in the tutorial forum so you can look there if you are unsure of how to do that.)
Another option is to process the image like normal in RAW and then bring it into PS and do the b&w conversion and use levels or curves to do the adjustments to bring up the whites, the midtones and the blacks. As you can see, there's more than one way to do high key!
Lousy Cyclamen
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