A Dragon's Gentle Snap
Well, no, "Backlit" wasn't a snap, it never is. We've had this theme a few times, and I've struggled with it every single time. I don't know why exactly because I often use back-light for my macros, but when it's specifically asked for... The human brain can be a weird "machine", right? ;)
So this is a withered, dried, but still very graceful and lovely snapdragon (in German, it's Löwenmäulchen, "lion's mouth") petal collected from the balcony a week or so ago, and focus stacked to get all the nice backlit details. Ironically, it was one of the first photos I've taken today, but I was in this "Oh no, a petal is boring, let's try this, no, this is boring, too, let's try that..."-mood, so I took numerous photos of different things before I checked the time. "Oh dear, it's already that late!" So I quickly flipped through all the images in DXO PL6, and realized that the final jpg of the in-camera focus stacking snapdragon petal series actually looked fine. But I still wanted to see what Helicon Focus could do regarding the details and the (back) light artifacts, and the results were even better. Method C/Smoothing 4 yielded the best final results, and this is what you see here.
Setup: Snapdragon petal propped up against a small glass jar for stability, single LED light placed behind the glass jar. The glass jar helped a little to distract/diffuse the light which had been too harsh with the LED lamp placed directly behind the petal. Since the tiny jar was still a little bigger than the petal, there was some of it visible in the final image, so I masked the background out in LR (or rather: LR did it for me) and reduced the blacks, depths, lights, whites, exposure, clarity (in other words: everything) to zero to black out the backdrop. In PS/Color Efex, I used the "Brilliance and Warmth" filter to slightly increase the perceptual saturation and to add a little more warmth to the colours. Done. Finally :)
HMM, Everyone!
A Dragon's Gentle Snap
Well, no, "Backlit" wasn't a snap, it never is. We've had this theme a few times, and I've struggled with it every single time. I don't know why exactly because I often use back-light for my macros, but when it's specifically asked for... The human brain can be a weird "machine", right? ;)
So this is a withered, dried, but still very graceful and lovely snapdragon (in German, it's Löwenmäulchen, "lion's mouth") petal collected from the balcony a week or so ago, and focus stacked to get all the nice backlit details. Ironically, it was one of the first photos I've taken today, but I was in this "Oh no, a petal is boring, let's try this, no, this is boring, too, let's try that..."-mood, so I took numerous photos of different things before I checked the time. "Oh dear, it's already that late!" So I quickly flipped through all the images in DXO PL6, and realized that the final jpg of the in-camera focus stacking snapdragon petal series actually looked fine. But I still wanted to see what Helicon Focus could do regarding the details and the (back) light artifacts, and the results were even better. Method C/Smoothing 4 yielded the best final results, and this is what you see here.
Setup: Snapdragon petal propped up against a small glass jar for stability, single LED light placed behind the glass jar. The glass jar helped a little to distract/diffuse the light which had been too harsh with the LED lamp placed directly behind the petal. Since the tiny jar was still a little bigger than the petal, there was some of it visible in the final image, so I masked the background out in LR (or rather: LR did it for me) and reduced the blacks, depths, lights, whites, exposure, clarity (in other words: everything) to zero to black out the backdrop. In PS/Color Efex, I used the "Brilliance and Warmth" filter to slightly increase the perceptual saturation and to add a little more warmth to the colours. Done. Finally :)
HMM, Everyone!