Weekly Photo Challenge: Shine

After a downpour it’s hard to miss the shine of the sun. I got this photo after a fairly heavy rain.  The few raindrops left on the petals stand in contrast to the bright sun:

ISO 800 4.3mm f/8.0 1/1250

I left the editing of this photo to a minimum.  Here is the original:

ISO 800 4.3mm f/8.0 1/1250

The change here was done using split toning in Lightroom.  Split toning allowed me to give the autumn colors a bit of a warm glow by using the highlights to bring out a bit of an orange tone.  I added a bit of the deeper blue in the sky by darkening the blues in the shadows.  Split toning also has a balance slider that allows you to change the balance of the edit you are applying making it either more in the highlights or more in the shadows.  In this case it is adding more to the highlights.  I got the idea to give the balance slider a try after watching this short tutorial.

How do you like the edit?  I like the original, but I really like the orange tones in the edit.  I think they appeal to me right now because it is fall here and orange is a color that I have always associated with fall.  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Portrait

Who do you see when you look at this photograph?

ISO 400 4.3mm f/2.7 1/200

I see a portrait of my youngest child.  I see that child has come back from a walk. Bringing evidence of the outdoors, flowers in this case.  The last few weeks it has been likely to be blackberries or an unripe apple fallen from the tree brought back to the house for further “research”.

I had been doing some research on photo editing at the time these flowers arrived and had just finished reading this short article on split toning.  I took some macro shots of the flowers so I could experiment a bit using the information I had just read.  I shot images with both my DSLR and my point and shoot, but ended up liking the point and shoot versions where I had used the macro setting better.  Here is the shot I decided I liked best:

ISO 400 4.3mm f/2.7 1/200

I thought this version was a good candidate for my split toning experiment.  I did all the editing for the photo in Lightroom. The article I had read had suggested that when using split toning, you should pick the highlights or the shadows and just edit one of the two. That seemed like a logical starting point, but after making the highlights more yellow, I decided to go ahead and make the shadows more brown.  It transformed the photo from very cool to very warm.  I then boosted the color saturation of the purples a bit so they would stand out a bit more.  I added a bit of sharpening and then cropped the image.

How do you like the final version? I think I added in the warmth of color to reflect the warmth of the moment that I felt in receiving these flowers.  When I look at the original I think it would be possible to edit a colder tone version that would be very different but perhaps beautiful in its own way.  I tend to gravitate to warmer images, how about you?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Change of Season

One of the things that I love about the change of seasons is the transition flowers go through.  I chose to photograph two wildflowers that are in the yard.  One looks like it is done for the season and the other hasn’t gotten the memo regarding the frost we have had.

ISO 160 50mm 0ev f/3.2 1/100

This is my flower that is done for the season.  When I was shooting this flower and the one you will see below I set my f-stop to 3.2 because that was enough to capture the detail of the flower and blur out the background.  Because the f-stop setting like that will let in a lot of light I used a high shutter speed and a low ISO to keep the images from being overexposed.  Both images were edited using Camera Raw.  I converted them both to greyscale and then applied some split toning.  For this first flower I have my color settings on blue but at a low saturation.  I felt like this helped convey the cold of the approaching season.

This flower, processed in a similar way but with different settings:

ISO 160 50mm f/3.2 1/100

Here I used a combination of yellow and orange and a high saturation.  I was hoping to convey the fading warmth that this flower is pretty successfully hanging on to.

This post was written in part as a response to Sonel’s Split-Toning Challenge.  Her theme for this week was change of season.  If you are interested in split-toning at all I would encourage you to visit her blog, she has a lot of helpful hints and she uses a variety of different programs to edit her images.

What do you think of my flowers? Kind of hard to believe they are right next to one another in the yard isn’t it?

Cheers!

When image editing runs amuck

I took some photos last week of a beautiful backlit wildflower.  That was the quick and easy part.  I am currently taking a photoshop class, so I have been busy editing everything.  When I took the photo, I had split toning in mind. Sonel hosts a weekly split toning challenge and the theme this week was flowers.  Here is my final image:

ISO 160 50mm 0ev f/5 1/125

The “problem” with Photoshop is that you could muck around with a photo pretty much forever.  I put problem in quotes because I am quite aware that is a user induced problem; the Photoshop program is also happy to sit idle on your machine.

But back to this image.  I liked the photos I had taken of this flower, but I was wondering if I could get a more detailed result by creating an HDR image.  So, I tried it and here is the result:

ISO 160 50mm 0ev f/5 1/125

It is pretty, but I was really looking to bring out some detail in the center of the flower, so I considered this a partial success.  I then shifted my focus back to split toning.  I opened this HDR image in Bridge and converted it to greyscale.  Then I looked at my split toning options.  I decided to make the highlights red and the shadows yellow.  I still was not completely happy with the center of the flower. So, I opened my photo as a smart object in Photoshop.  Once I had done that, in the layers panel I clicked the make copy via smart object option.  I did this because I knew that I could then take my copy back into Camera Raw, adjust the exposure for the center of the flower, and then go back into Photoshop.  Then I made a mask and keep the center only of that version for my final version.  Once I had the flower looking the way I wanted, I cropped and sharpened the image.

That’s a lot of editing for a flower.  More than I really was thinking when I took the photo.  How about you, have you ever gone overboard with your editing?  What do you think of my final images? do you prefer one over the other? questions about my editing? Your comments are welcome below.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Good Morning!

This photo was shot on a sunny morning over the summer.  I pulled it out of my archives in part to re-edit it.  In my Photoshop class we have covered split toning and I thought this image might be a good candidate for that.  Here is the edited version:

ISO 200 50mm f/5.6 1/250

Here is the original photo:

ISO 200 50mm f/5.6 1/250

Split toning can be done in Camera Raw if you have Photoshop.  Basically what I have done is first convert the image to grayscale.  Split toning then allows you to bring a hint of color back into your photo.  In this case I set the hue slider to yellow and bumped up the saturation until I go the image that you see.  I then sharpened the image a bit.

Photoshop is not the only editing software that has split toning.  If you are interested in knowing a bit more about the topic I would recommend this blog post by Sonel.  I have provided a link to a post she wrote about a month ago where she explains in some detail how it works.  She has also included screen shots of her process which are very informative.

This post was written in part as a response to the WordPress weekly photo challenge which has the theme, Good Morning!

Thanks for stopping by, feel free to leave a comment about split toning or my image in the comments below.

Cheers!