Spring Dogwoods

Here is the same without contrast adjustments or sharpening

Beautiful composition and lighting. Congrats.

Bg seems to me very good and shows better first flowers,concerning sharpness i say that looks a little bit to sharp and disturbing and looking at the version this need some sharpness so my opinion is that somewhere in the middle would be very good,best regards.

RC

Very well composed, Walter, I like the shot very much. The darker space lower right is well balanced by the background flowers in the opposite corner. This must have been quite a challenge to take with the "Big Bertha". Regarding sharpness, it is not oversharpened for me, though when I compare thoroughly, it seems that you applied the sharpening to the whole image area, which slightly decreases the softness and blurriness of the bokeh areas. What method are you using to downsize and sharpen for web ?

Hi Peter. It was a bit of a challenge because it was windy when I took this and I needed a long exposure. I got lucky every few seconds when the wind calmed down. Very frustrating! As far the sharpning, I did just a quick Smart Sharpen in PS. This upload is more of a test than anything; I prefer softer and less sharp on this one. With that said, a couple more millimeters of DOF would have been nice, just to get that foreground leaf in critical focus. Regards.

If the leaf were within DOF, it would be perfect, but I know how difficult this can be if you have no possibility of immediate feedback you would have from a digital camera. And you were pretty lucky to have no wind at all for the critical five seconds. 

For downsizing to web, I use a slightly modified procedure of Carsten Ranke: downsize to the web size using the Bilinear option, then convert the image to Lab. I sharpen the Lightness channel using Sharpen, then Edit...Fade Sharpen to the desired degree. If only a portion of the image should be sharpened, I work on a copy of the layer and mask all the area that does not need sharpening. This procedure works better for me than the algorithm of Marc Adamus. Best regards. Peter

Beautifully done, perhpas a wee bit sharp but didn't bother me when viewing--I had to reallly stop and search or those areas.

Vey well presented, a pleasure to view, Thankyou for sharing, Gail

Thanks for that info Peter. Would you care to share Marc's method with me? Regards.

Walter, here it is:

http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=7311650

A note - I tried the version with downsizing to twice the size of the final web image, then Sharpen twice and downsize to web size.

Best regards.

Peter

A very nicely composed shot with beautiful lighting and colours, Walter!

With best regards,

Ruud.

Here is another version, using a B&W conversion layer and an intermediary gamma levels layer, with an eraser.

Nice shot and composition

Gianluigi