Paeony.
One of the good things about winter is that, as you huddle by a warm PC gazing out into the frigid grey wastes of the garden, you get to review some of the pictures you captured this year in sunnier times. I end up with a whole list of images just waiting for me to crystalise the visual idea that I had at the time of taking... if only I could remember what it was!
Such a one is this.
Ah. The paeony. Much-loved….
A paeony flower reminds me of a person that you get to know and love over time, full of inner complexity and unpredictable delight. That and the sumptuous colour tones make it one of my favourite flowers… and that’s without the delicate feminine fragrance that some of them have. A joy to the senses.
This particular processing approach is one I have tried before and really liked. I first came across it in Harold Davis’ books.
(If you are into photography books then I do recommend looking at The Photoshop Darkroom and Photographing Flowers by Harold, or his other ones too, though there is quite a bit of overlap in technique between them all.)
For this shot I developed the same raw capture three times: a dark version to take out the background, a medium version, and a bright, highlight version. With the dark version as the base the other two were placed as layers on top, each masked out. Then you paint on the two masks to reintroduce lighter areas into the image. This gives you a lot of control of the lighting which I think can be really effective for the subtlety of flowers. Well, that’s the theory anyway and I wanted to give it another try…
I’ll post a link to the base layer in the first comment as I think it is quite an interesting version in its own right. If I get a chance I also hope to post some colour-zapped versions for Sliders Sunday which will have a link to the original in-camera image.
Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image :)
[Monopod in daylight taken last May/June time.
Developed three times in Capture One for colour and clarity.
Layers combined in Affinity Photo, knocking out the background by raising the black point in the Levels filter.
Some inpainting of spurious stuff in the background.
A bit of tweaking colour and brightness using Curves in LAB mode. No vignette ;) ]
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