A White Gardinia Peony

[FrankMi]

In this image I am trying to set the white levels properly so that I don't lose any details to blown highlights. In an earlier posting someone mentioned setting the RGB values, as tested using the Color Sampler, to not exceed 240 so that is what I've tried to do here.



Are we successful? or not so much?

Suggestions for improvement?

[DanK]

Frank,

Peonies are beautiful to look at but very hard to photograph, IMHO.

I don't think this one quite does it, frankly. Here is why. Peonies have beautiful detail, but the detail in this one is very hard to see because of the limited tonal and color variation. In contrast, the leaves in the background are high contrast and in focus, providing lots and lots of detail that draws the eye away from the flower.

I'm not sure I have the postprocessing skills to do this well, but I have a few ideas. One, you could select the background and blur it, and you could darken it, to make it less distracting. You could use a curves adjustment and local contrast to bring out detail in the flower. I didn't fuss with the background, but here is a really crude quick example of the adjustments to the flower. It's not very good, but it shows what these would do:



The levels adjustment was this:



For local contrast, I use unsharp mask, amount 20, radius 50, threshold zero. If you use Lightroom, you can accomplish something similar by using the clarity slider.

You could also selectively sharpen the flower a bit.

Again, this is not very good--probably a little overdone--but I hope it gives you a couple of things to try.

Dan

[Downrigger]

It's a nice shot. I think Dan's work helps. I wonder if part of the problem - unfixable - is the flat light. The lighting doesn't seem to be offering any help.

[IzzieK]

I wonder if you can use a grey card and/or reflector?

[Shadowman]

In this image I am trying to set the white levels properly so that I don't lose any details to blown highlights. In an earlier posting someone mentioned setting the RGB values, as tested using the Color Sampler, to not exceed 240 so that is what I've tried to do here.



Are we successful? or not so much?

Suggestions for improvement?

Frank,

Are you getting highlight warnings in camera? Do you have any examples where you used exposure compensation to limit or eliminate in camera?

[DanK]

With respect to the last comments, I don't think this is an issue of exposure. Check the histogram:



There is no clipping at either end. The big mass on the left is the dark leaves, while the much smaller peak on the right is the flower. One clue is the relatively small span (on the horizontal axis) of the right-hand peak. That means that the flower has relatively limited tonal range. The flower part of the image also has very little contrast. I think this is partly from flat lighting, as Mark suggested, but it is also the nature of the particular flower.

It seems to me that leaving aside the problem of the distracting background, the issue is how to get more pop into the flower. Less flat lighting would help a lot, but there is no way to improve that now for this shot. That leaves a number of postprocessing options, which may or may not work (at least in the hands of someone as unskilled as I am). The curve I tried increases the contrast (the slope of the curve) in the area of the flower, while keeping the background unchanged other than a bit of darkening. Local contrast or clarity tends to bring out detail, although it looks ugly if overdone. You could also move the midpoint up with a levels adjustment, which I did for the image below. I just did it quickly, and I think it now requires a little lightening of the lower edges of the flower.



Other options I didn't try are selective sharpening and perhaps some burning to darken some areas of the flower.

[jprzybyla]

Hello Frank, looking carefully at the posted image it appears a few areas of the petals have white highlights that were blown during the capture of the image. Setting the white color to 240 will limit the white in processing to reach clipping levels (15 levels short of clipping) but will not replace the texture and detail that may be lost. I expose white flowers the same as I do white birds. That is to set the highlight screen on the LCD display to show clipping and lower the exposure until no clipping is indicated. In post processing I raise the exposure until clipping is shown and then back off until the exposure looks right. Using the Highlight slider the detail/texture can now be recovered. Reds and yellows also blow out very easily and have to be treated the same way. I expose for the highlights and develop for the shadows.

[DanK]

Joe,

Good point. I may have misunderstood. My last comment assumed that the lack of clipping in the histogram was from the initial exposure, not from pulling back the whites. If the brights are overexposed enough, there won't be detail to recover.

I do pretty much what you do, except that I do it based on whichever color channel is furthest to the right, because particularly with flowers, you can blow out one channel easily (most often the red, in my experience) even if the total histogram looks just fine.

Dan

[Ken Curtis]

Hi Frank.

Some of the techniques presented above leave gray petals. I found that using a good sharpening tool, such as Nik Sharpener Pro, works quite well for bringing out details in white objects like peonies and snow. I have also used Nik ColorEfex Pro tonal contrast filter to bring out detail.

[jprzybyla]

When lowering the exposure of white feathers, flower petals, or anything white and it turns grey instead of staying white it is a sure sign that the white highlights have been clipped. Sometimes it shows up as a grey ring around a patch of white when the exposure is lowered. One way I have found to correct small areas if the image is important is to go into Photoshop and pick a similar area of color and detail and clone that over the clipped area.

[FrankMi]

Producing good images of white objects is an area that I am starting to explore and thankfully there is plenty of friendly and knowledgeable help available here at CiC.

I suspect that this is going to take some time to fully absorb but fortunately I can go back to the original and try the techniques presented. It's not like there's a shortage of white subjects to practice on to address the clipping part of the problem!

I'll start with Dan's suggestion for reducing the attention grabbing aspect of the background, then work through the other suggestions until I either understand what needs to be done or I have additional questions.

[DanK]

Frank,

One of my solutions some people might think of as cheating: I do most of my flowers indoors, where I can control lighting, use a simple background, and keep the flower still enough that I can stack images for depth of field. Even with that, peonies are very tough to do.

Here is an example of my setup:



Here is the photo from that:



The background is a black fleece jacket I picked up on clearance. The lights are "hair lights"--cheap boom lights that you can aim--with regular halogen floods in them. For diffusion, I am now using parchment paper my wife keeps around for cooking. I often hold the flower with a Wimberly plamp, as in this case, but the pile of junk on the table is whatever is handy to bring a subject up to camera height when I don't use the plamp.

Dan

[IzzieK]

Dan ... that is absolutely gorgeous!

Frank,

One of my solutions some people might think of as cheating: I do most of my flowers indoors, where I can control lighting, use a simple background, and keep the flower still enough that I can stack images for depth of field. Even with that, peonies are very tough to do.

Here is an example of my setup:



Here is the photo from that:



The background is a black fleece jacket I picked up on clearance. The lights are "hair lights"--cheap boom lights that you can aim--with regular halogen floods in them. For diffusion, I am now using parchment paper my wife keeps around for cooking. I often hold the flower with a Wimberly plamp, as in this case, but the pile of junk on the table is whatever is handy to bring a subject up to camera height when I don't use the plamp.

Dan

[FrankMi]

Frank,

Are you getting highlight warnings in camera? Do you have any examples where you used exposure compensation to limit or eliminate in camera?

I don't recall seeing them so I may not have had the camera configured to display highlight warnings and, most likely, didn't check for them at the time. Note to self, be sure to check for the 'blinkies' in playback right after shooting white objects!

[FrankMi]

"some people might think of as cheating"

Nice setup and your results show it Dan!

It's only "cheating" to some of those that don't want to (fill in the blank as appropriate) use their camera to its fullest potential, purchase the necessary equipment/software to accomplish the goal at hand, practice and learn the techniques involved, go out of their way to be in the right place at the right time, etc.

For the rest of us, learning the techniques others have used to be successful is why we frequent this forum! I may not always have the budget or skill but with every suggestion I have an opportunity to get closer to the result I'm looking for.

Thank you so much for providing this useful example.

[FrankMi]

Joe,

Good point. I may have misunderstood. My last comment assumed that the lack of clipping in the histogram was from the initial exposure, not from pulling back the whites. If the brights are overexposed enough, there won't be detail to recover.

I do pretty much what you do, except that I do it based on whichever color channel is furthest to the right, because particularly with flowers, you can blow out one channel easily (most often the red, in my experience) even if the total histogram looks just fine.

Dan

I need to clear up any assumptions that may have been caused by my initial post processing attempts so here is the original before any post processing other than to do a size reduction for TinyPics.



I knew when I took the shot that the background was going to be a distraction so I took a second close-by image so that I could concentrate on learning how to capture the whites.



This should eliminate any issues that I may have introduced as I stumbled around in Photoshop.

[DanK]

Thanks, Izzie and Frank.

Apart from cameras and lenses, on which I have splurged a bit in recent years, I try to keep the rest of the stuff cheap. My total outlay for that setup is not much over $200, apart from the fleece jacket (a closeout) and the frame it rests on (a clothes rack my daughter left in the basement). :-)

[rudi]

Hi Frank,

I get the idea that you missed focus a tad. But it can be my older eyes...

I usually use spotmetering with white flowers, gives a nicer background too.

Kr, Rudi