Rain on paeony flower.
Yeah, I realise it’s another droplets on pink paeony petals image, but in my (somewhat desperate) defence what else can I do with all these, but see if some are worth publishing? :)
This may look like a relatively photo-realistic shot, but it’s really a highly contrived one for Sliders Sunday this week. I’ll post a link to the original in-camera image so you can see how far we came
Originally I had intended to produce an arty variant, perhaps with a pseudo pencil drawing emphasising the petal edges but I kind of got distracted (several times) along the way.
One thing I have discovered about these forays into fiddling and filters (aka Sliders Sunday playtime) is that I learn far more from what doesn’t work than what does. That's good as far more doesn’t work in any case :) So with this.
The real interest in this image for me are the droplets and the petal shapes so that’s the direction the processing journey drifted most of the time.
I first developed the image in Affinity and then duplicated the resulting base layer and took it into Topaz Studio and used the Simplify filter. This smoothes the detail and thickens the petal edges. I then blended the result back with the original developed version using Overlay at 100%. This added contrast and pulled back some of the smoothing effect.
I took the merged result back into Topaz and used the Textures module to add… well, textures (there’s nothing like an informative commentary is there?). Apart from surface texture one of the texture layers added subtle bokeh lighting which produced the dappled light effect which seemed to add visual interest.
So at this stage, we have thick smooth petals, defined droplets, a dark vignette and more interesting lighting. The final tweak was to add surface texture to the whole image based on the brightness.
Using the Lighting filter in Affinity I added two white spotlights, low down and far away in the top left and top right corners, adding the luminance texturing which produces an embossing effect on the highlights and shadows (having two spots evens out the 3D look a bit). Curiously this had a fairly radical effect on the droplet definition, almost like an overdose of micro-contrast in an HDR filter, but simplified.
Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image! Happy Sliders Sunday :)
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