White Wild Flower
By Brian Auer • April 19th, 2007This was a photo I took a while ago — back before my days of SLR. I was using an ultra-zoom at the time, but it worked out fine for most things. This photo was taken in North Idaho (back home), and I sat on it for the longest time because it just didn’t do anything for me. It’s some kind of wild flower, but I don’t know what it’s called and I’m too lazy to find out. Actually, it’s probably more of a weed than anything. They’re all over the place out there and I’ve seen them in a couple of different colors. I took the shot straight down into this flower, but unfortunately I framed it right in the center (1). That’s probably why I didn’t do anything with it for a while — it wasn’t really eye catching. But then I got a little creative with it.
I started off by setting the composition a little better. A square crop (2) seemed to suit it a little more nicely, but I left the flower in the center because it seemed to work better that way. I was on a black & white kick, so I used a black & white adjustment layer (3) in Adobe Photoshop CS3. I set it to 0% red, 0% yellow, 0% green, 110% cyan, 110% blue, and 110% magenta. This turned the green/yellow background nearly black while making the purple/blue flower almost white. Then I did a curves adjustment layer (4) with an “S” curve that was a bit heavy on the dark side, but I still brightened the highlights some too. The last thing I did was a little sharpening and the addition of vignette (5) to soften the corner midtones and highlights some. Given what I started with, I was pretty happy with the outcome.
Photo by Brian Auer
06/05/05 Post Falls, ID
White Wild Flower
Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3
62mm equiv * f/3.2 * 1/40s * ISO64
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from San Diego, California. 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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I saw that picture some days ago in your Gallery and it really caught my eye. It’s amazing how different the appeal of it is from colored to black & white. In the colored version the flower doesn’t pop out at all but in black & white it is amazing.
Just a thought but have you tried how it looks when you leave the flower in color and just change the background to B&W? Maybe not bring the color all the way back but just a bit so that it gets a pastel color look or old hand colored look to it?
Hey, that might not be a bad idea. Maybe I’ll see how it looks with just the ring of petals in color, or even the whole flower. The B&W image isn’t far from being a mask itself, so it shouldn’t be hard to overlay some color. I’ll post it up if I can make anything of it — maybe over the weekend. Thanks!
Yeah, it should also be pretty simple to only get the blossoms with the Quick Selection tool or with Select>Color Range, since the color is so different from the rest.
I really love how the flower pops out. Really effective conversion.
Thanks Sil, it sure does stand out better than it did in color, doesn’t it? I love your work, by the way. You have some great black & whites — my favorite.
Thanks Brian. Glad you liked my B&W shots
I’m glad I discovered your blog. I immediately subscribed to it!