Weekly Post-Processing Challenge - March 29 2015

<p>Still life from a greenhouse this week. Enjoy (hopefully more than last week :) )</p><div></div>

<p>Larger image</p><div></div>

<p>My take:Basic ACR processing and converted to BW and crop in ACR. In CS6 noise and sharpening.</p><div></div>

<p>The bright background and lens flare render this week's image challenging indeed. Excellent motivation, Rick.</p>

<p>Initially, I decided that I needed to try to rid the image of distracting elements, so in PSE11 I cropped it drastically. Then I applied levels and the shadow adjustment slider. In Color Efex, my first step was to utilize the pro contrast filter to correct color cast and to adjust the contrasts. Next I applied the darken/lighten center filter to add luminosity to the subject, and I finally added a blur vignette.</p><div></div>

<p>My approach was to Field Blur the background and drop its exposure by 1.3 stops, apply color dodge, screen blending, midtown contrast, vibrance, and an s-curve to the flower and add a vertical crop.<br>

Allyn</p><div></div>

<p>I just tweaked it to correct the OOF and flare. Cropped to remove some of the empty background.</p>

<p>Second try</p><div></div>

<p>This is the result of my effort using shadow/highlight tool of the PS5<br>

<img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/17995170-md.jpg" alt="" width="544" height="680" /></p>

<p> </p>

<p>I used Topaz Simplify in Photoshop CS5 to eliminate small details of the image, cropped, played with color hue and saturation, and then applied some freehand painting of various pastel colors on the blown out highlights. No layers or masks were used, so it was an intuitive, no going back more than a few steps without starting over, approach. A fun image to work on. I thought about converting to black and white, but decided that I liked the colors.</p><div></div>

<p>Interesting ideas. I had used Viveva - adjusted levels & a tad of structure & saturation. Cropped to offset bud.</p><div></div>

<p>Background was processed separately - gaussian blur, change of colour to make it warmer and a little bit of desaturation. Main object was sharpen and levels correction was applied. Then resizing and framing.<br>

GIMP 2.8.10<br>

Regards.</p><div></div>

<p>A very challenging choice. Mainly Lightroom and a little cloning in Elements</p><div></div>

<p>Hi Rick, just for my FYI, I see color banding (red) in the original and what the others have submitted. My 27" Dell monitor is calibrated with 1display profiler, I just want to make sure that my v. card and/or monitor is not bad and maybe needs to be changed. Thanks</p>

<p>Sunil, I see color banding too. Perhaps some flare artifact?</p>

<p>Rick, sorry not to have participated this week. Very busy -- taxes and such. Besides, there wasn't much I could add to the prior edits, perhaps other than colorizing away the subtle banding. Nice image, BTW!</p>

<p>No worry Sarah. sunil not your monitor, it is sun flair ... kinda what I liked about the original.<br>

<br />Any takers for starting Sunday?</p>

<p>I continue to prefer what I can get out of Paintshop Pro when it comes to post processing. Using v.X7 now.<br>

<img src="http://michaelmcbroom.com/images/flower_bud_photo_net.jpg" alt="" /></p>

<p>Rick, I'm your man if no one else steps forward. Hope you and yours have a meaningful holiday season.</p>

<p>Same to you Michael, and we'll see what you have in store for us then.</p>

<p>Thanks for the clarification</p>