My wife planted this too close to the garage, and I’ve been waiting patiently for weeks for one of its blooms to face where I have to stand with the camera. The brightness of the flower relative to that of the leaves is unbelievable – I had to use –2/3ev exposure compensation to control the flower and then selectively use the equivalent of a screen blend to pull some of the leaves out of the background.
Bob, Beautiful flower, however a bit dark. It looks as if the lighting was difficult due to fairly harsh sunlight. I believe (don't quote me on this) in CS3 at least, this could be balanced out a bit more. Did you shoot this in RAW or in JPEG? If you would like, I could give this a try if you could post a link to the original file. It would be tomorrow before I could try. But once again, beautiful flower.
Thanks Tom. Paul, you guessed right -- this was in direct sunlight. The original had severe glare from a couple of the leaves while others were completely under exposed. These blooms don't last very long -- this one was starting to wither and curl by late afternoon, so a redo under different lighting was not possible. I appreciate your offer to re-process the image -- I've redone it a half dozen times. At least one of those was with the flower a little brighter, but, quite frankly, it hurt my eyes. I kinda like this version -- the background is recognizable, but not so much as to detract from the flower:smile:. [Now I'm back to waiting for the rain to let up and the plant to produce some more flowers that are accessible to the camera.:wink:] Added note: Paul, I should mention that I took some shots with the area shaded -- that sometimes works well, but, in this case, it created color balance issues that were tricky to work with. A white tent to diffuse the light might have been nice.
