Garlic

[joebranko]

The colour image works very well also.

[ionian]

Lovely shot, and inspiring stuff to make beautiful images out of everyday items. That's one for the kitchen wall.

[Loose Canon]

Nice stuff John.

A spot or two in the BG on the mono but a great conversion.

Color shot looks really good. The BG rocks with this one. The gradient to center spot looks great.

[John 2]

Thanks all for the additional comments. Dan K was asking about how I went about this. I suppose that it is approx. one third in camera, one third Ps manipulation and the remainder the finishing of the image in Ps.

In camera, it's really about the lighting. I don't have a studio set up and wouldn't know what to do with a set of lights if I did. You need Mike for that. I use a glass roofed orangery that has draped white net curtains to kill the heat of any direct sunlight. On a bright overcast day this produces a flat, bright overhead light. With a white overall BG and subject, this produces a relatively shadow less rendition albeit fairly flat in tonal terms. Hence the on camera flash which in this case in order to produce a bit of modelling, was bounced off a white wall that runs diagonally and is behind my right shoulder. The flash was on about half power with a white handkerchief as a diffuser (had to experiment to get the power level right).

Ps manipulation comprised conversion to mono in ACR, the red areas were taken down tonally (to my eye, these are magenta but Ps disagreed) and the highlights were pulled back by pushing the ACR highlights slider to the left after some adjustment to the whites. Next I added a small amount of local contrast using the Clarity slider and then saved the result as a 16 bit TIF image in Ps proper. At this point, the shoulder of the RH garlic bulb was still too bright and was brought down by a combination of the selective use of the Highlight/Shadow tool and some burning in. Finally, I added a bit of texture using the Nik Vevisa Structure tool and then sharpened the image. In retrospect, it may be the sharpening that has produced a slightly graphic effect. I was working at 800 ISO and there was a small amount of noise. Fairly unobtrusive until you sharpen the image. To avoid this, I generally resort a high pass sharpening technique that allows you to add noise reduction to the high pass layer before enhancing the edge sharpness. It's probably the enhanced edge sharpening that has produced a slightly graphic look in the mono image.

Finishing in Ps involved brightening the overall image further, adding a vignette to the corners and adding a graduated darkening across the top half and bottom third to give a bit of tonal shape to the BG. It's essential to do this as a layer because it affects the subject as well but by finally erasing the appropriate parts of the layer, the areas of the subject (the Garlic) affected can be cleaned up.

Hope this was of interest.

[DanK]

This was very helpful. Thanks for taking the time to write such a thorough description.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[John 2]

You're very welcome Dan.

[Mike Buckley]

[the flash] was bounced off a white wall that runs diagonally and is behind my right shoulder. The flash was on about half power with a white handkerchief as a diffuser

I wonder if you tried making the image without the handkerchief. That's because bouncing the flash off a white wall produced such a large light source that I would be surprised to learn that the handkerchief changed the quality of light (as opposed to the brightness of light). I haven't done this myself, so I'm going on my understanding of theory, not real-world application.

[John 2]

And you're probably right Mike. I'm very much a suck it and see photographer when it come to this sort of shot. The handkerchief came first but there were still too many specular highlights and I just turned the flash around and it seemed to work. One day perhaps, I will get to grips with the theory.

[John 2]

I meant to add Mike that if you recall, I had set up originally to photograph some of my wife's pots. They have glazed surfaces and the reference to specular highlights refers to them. I just didn't change much when I went on to photograph the Garlic.

[Mike Buckley]

That makes sense, John.

If your flash can be used off-camera and if you haven't already used it that way, doing so would be the ideal additional next step for adding lighting options while still maintaining simple control of the lighting.