Glowing Daffodil
By Brian Auer • April 4th, 2007This was another photo taken using the method I talked about in my post Indoor Macro Photography Project for Rainy Days. It’s the same miniature daffodil as some of my other photos, but I decided to go black and white with this one. I also decided prior to editing that I wanted the photo to be a bit high-key and soft. The image below shows each step in the editing process — click for a larger view.
I started this one off by converting to black and white using the Photoshop CS3 Black & White adjustment layer. I applied 220% red, 100% yellow, 85% green, 175% cyan, 50% blue, and 0% magenta. This brightened up the petals quite a bit while brightening the trumpet even more. Then I adjusted the levels by bringing the graypoint to 1.14, which lessened the contrast a bit. After this, I applied four curves adjustments for both brightening and darkening, and I used masks to target certain areas and give the trumpet more contrasting tones to help create depth. Then I merged a copy into two new layers and applied a Gaussian blur of 16 pixels to soften the first layer. The second layer (on the very top) was blended into the blurred layer using a “Lighten” blend at 100% opacity and 100% fill. This step brought back some of the sharpness while brightening the highlights to create that sparkly look — it has more of an impact on the full size image.
Photo by Brian Auer
04/01/07 Flemington, NJ
Glowing Daffodil
Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D
Sigma MACRO 105mm f/2.8 EX DG
158mm equiv * f/32 * 15s * ISO100
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from North Idaho. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
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