You'll notice in the previous pic that the remaining background is actually very dark gray and you can see the texture of the black felt I use. Step 2 is making the background darker so the end result is evenly black. Again I use iPhoto Plus for this. You'll notice that the flowers are also darker now.
Last step, I use Ulead Photo Express to reduce the saturation slightly (makes the white background of the flower whiter) and use it's light adjustment feature to brighten up the flower while the background stays evenly black. So you can see I do a little editing in 3 phases. If I get the lighting and black felt positioned right, I don't need to do any editing but I need a bright day to accomplish this and I have not seen the sun locally for weeks!
Oh forgot about saturation!
I've been working on these hippeastrum today in photoshop. On this one, the camera whitens out the yellow glow so i've been putting it back in and darkening the background too.
My big concern is color accuracy of the flower. If that is fine, I don't photoshop. But if it's way off I kinda go crazy. Here is Benfica which was a Xmas red at first. The highlights are actually cherry red and the shadows are red black so I worked on the color and the levels to get as close to the color as I could.
I am ready to purchase a new digital camera and am stymied as to what to look for in order to take good closeups of flowers. What camera/specs should I look for? I need help.. This is making my head spin.
There are two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle
- Albert Einstein.
Ha, ha. I just went through that! I did months of research (reviews online) and I posted a question on LinkedIn and all these photo designers, etc. answered. That helped a lot. The big divide is point and shoot or DSLR.
I'm half way through the manual. Graduated from the auto-everything. Now we're moving on to creative dial setting. There's a snag. The manual is starting to throw in lots of abbvs. and not define them. In leu of a supplemental manual of abbvs. I'll have to Google.
Ursula, I thought about your question about getting detail on whites and yellows when I took this today. Your gift Euphorbia x lomi is blooming. It had lost all it's leaves but now they are back and happy with it's new home and watering schedule so the flowers have started blooming. I decided to take a pic in indirect bright light at f8 to start and go up in f-stops if the details didn't show (slowing the shutter speed so the aperture is open longer to register more details). There would be more chance of loss of sharpness though since I was handholding the camera. If I get blurry pics at f8 I would have used a tripod and a remote shutter release to keep the camera really steady. Turned out f8 was fine.
Oh, something else I use is a gray card and custom white balance but I'll only get into that if you're interested. I do a lot of manual stuff now. Custom WB, set on AV (aperture priority) and manual focus.
Do you want to start it? Or do you want me to?
