Spring
Just last week, I was admiring interesting shapes/lines the "naked" trees form. It seems all of a sudden, flowers exploded on this tree across the street. When did Spring sneak up on us?
This was my photo of today. Of the 18 photos I took of this tree, I liked this one (original below) most as it is relatively sharp (it was very windy today, making it challenging to take a sharp photo that's not completely dark) and just the overall composition. What I didn't like about the original photo was how cluttered it seemed; my eyes were pretty distracted, not knowing where to focus. Here're some things I did to bring out the photo more -
- First I cropped out most of the flowers on the lower left that's competing for attention. Since they were at about the same distance as the main flower cluster, those flowers were also in-focus and taking away from the photo
- Playing around with the Tone Curve in Lightroom, I brightened the photo a little bit. In the end, I liked the "Creative-Direct Positive" preset and went with that.
- Wanting to bring out the main flower cluster more, I used a tip from the Shutter-life blog and de-saturated all but the colors belonging to main flower cluster in Lightroom. In this case, I set all except yellow & orange colors to -100; orange was set to -29 and yellow -45. I had to take away more of the yellow as it brings out the leaves too much when yellow was more saturated.
- By now, the photo is fairly mute, using split tone controls in Lightroom, I brought back just a touch of color to the photo. I used orange/red for highlights (saturation of 12) blue/purple (saturation of 4) for the shadows.
- For the finishing touch, I added a 50px vignette to the photo using Photoshop as described on Digital Photography School's vignette how-to entry.
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