Curls and Textures

Curls and Textures
Originally uploaded by doug_r

This is a reworked image from the archives. Originally take on April 14, 2007 at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate State Park, San Francisco, California.

The flower was a sort of pinkish coral orange (to my eyes) on a fairly dark green leafy background. My origiinal visualization of the black and white version of this image was to highlight the curl of the petal as well as the diamond mesh texture on the rather extravagant corkscrew by giving them an isolation and careful enhancement of the tonal values in the mids and upper highlights.

As far as processing goes, I began by increasing the vibrance of the raw image before jumping into Photoshop. Next I cropped the image down from the much larger initial photo to set up the composition and concentrate attention on the flower itself. After relatively standard application of Levels and Curves, I used Nik Silver Effects to do the black and white conversion. Within the Nik AgEfx package, I used a very mild pale blue filter to give a bit more contrast to the image, and an Ilford ISO 50 black and white film profile to get a good contrasty tonal range. I also decreased the grain size a bit to keep it from interfering with with fine texture on the cork screw.

After exiting Nik, I applied another Level layer, using my now standard Threshold layer technique to find and set up final light and dark endpoints on the Level histogram. Even still, the lightest part of the petal texture was a bit blown out by about a quarter or third stop, so I selected just that area using the color range selector and then a downward bowed Curve layer to bring down the brightness for those areas just a bit.

Next came burning and dodging to darken a few of the brighter specular leaf highlights in the background and to put a bit of a vignette around the main body of the flower. Instead of the default Photoshop burn and dodge tools, I use the rather more controllable method of overlaying the image with a new layer blended with soft light, and filled with the 50% neutral tone. Then using pure black and white as the foreground and background, (switching as required), and using a soft edged, nearly transparent paintbrush, one can darken or lighten in a gentle, slow, and very controllabe manner.

I'm pretty happy with this image - it's eye catching and the contrast between the rather hard curves of the cork screw and the soft roll of the petal are well differentiated. The goal of showing off the texture difference was fairly straight-forward to achieve though processing, though this didn't occur until the sharpening step. I had hoped to be able to highlight the little white pollen grains on the end of the corkscrew and that too turned out to be relatively easy to do just by watching the levels endpoints in the final levels layer. The bokeh also turned out quite well too.

The only thing I'm mildly chapped about in this image is that depth of field is not quite perfect. Shooting at f3.2, the back of the corkscrew is a little bit out of focus; an f-stop of 3.6 or 4.0 might have been better to get it all in perfect focus yet still isolated from the background.