Simple white Japanese peony

[DanK]

Last weekend, I was visiting someone who had a white Japanese peony in her garden. She asked for a photo. All I had with me was my little Lumix LX-100, which fortunately has a close-focusing "macro" mode.

White flowers are often fairly featureless. At the same time, leaves in the background were fairly high-contrast and quite distracting. So I did the following simple edits, all in LR:

-- increased contrast both by stretching the histogram and using a curve
--added clarity
--sharpened, with a fairly large radius
--darkened and blurred the leaves in the background, particularly on the left, where they were brighter and more distracting
--burned two of the corners and added a slight vignette.

Not one that will go on the wall, but I think this may have worked to give the flower some character.

C&C welcome, as always.

[rudi]

Thats a great capture from a very nice white peony Dan !!
At first glance I would remove the brighter green 'stemm' bottom middle, and darken the leaf left middle a tad....but thats really really nitpicking and perhaps I will change my mind tomorrow...
Thanks for adding your 'simple edits'. Always interesting.

[Shadowman]

Nice capture.

[Geoff F]

Also, top right corner area there is an outer petal with a very small mark/hole. Hardly noticeable but you may as well clone it over.