More Dead Flowers

[derekphil]

Another image of dying flowers, this time lilies in the back garden.
I find that decaying flowers can be just as interesting as when they are in full bloom.
A five exposure stack.

This is my second attempt at posting this, so if it appears twice, apologies.

[Wavelength]

Very interesting; well done; the flower seen behind may be made more dull or cloned out

[Manfred M]

I like the concept, but wonder about the execution. The whole image looks rather underexposed. While I can see why you might want to do that to keep the background under control, the histogram suggests you could look at lifting the highlights and mid-tones a bit.

[xpatUSA]

I like the concept, but wonder about the execution. The whole image looks rather underexposed. While I can see why you might want to do that to keep the background under control, the histogram suggests you could look at lifting the highlights and mid-tones a bit.

Somewhat OT because the posted image is from a stack:

I often whine about image appearance vs. "exposure". Elsewhere, it is quite common for a bright image to be referred to as "over-exposed" and vice versa, as here, a dark image said to "look rather under-exposed" perhaps implying (but not actually saying) that the sensor was under-exposed during the shot.

In a fit of pique, again elsewhere, I once posted two images to make the point: the one over-exposed at the sensor but darkened in post, the other under-exposed but brightened in post. Nobody got it.

Such is the sad life of a pedant ...

[Manfred M]

Somewhat OT because the posted image is from a stack:

I often whine about image appearance vs. "exposure". Elsewhere, it is quite common for a bright image to be referred to as "over-exposed" and vice versa, as here, a dark image said to "look rather under-exposed" perhaps implying (but not actually saying) that the sensor was under-exposed during the shot.

In a fit of pique, again elsewhere, I once posted two images to make the point: the one over-exposed at the sensor but darkened in post, the other under-exposed but brightened in post. Nobody got it.

Such is the sad life of a pedant ...

Actually Ted, part of the issue is that we have transferred a lot of "wet" darkroom terminology into the digital "darkroom" world.

In the wet darkroom making a print was done on an enlarger and the overall brightness of the final print was determined by getting the exposure at that stage of the processing correct. Negative density, type of photographic paper, height of the enlarger head above the easel (holding the photographic paper), aperture setting on the enlarger lens, etc. all impacted the exposure (time measured in seconds and in some cases minutes).

Photoshop has an "exposure" function. It also has the ability to crop, dodge, burn, etc. All "wet" darkroom terminology that we use in digital image post-processing. We should perhaps come up with new more "correct" terminology?

Dodging and burning in the wet darkroom were very much local exposure adjustments that were controlled by blocking (dodging) the light falling on specific places on the photographic paper. Burning was the opposite; we blocked the light from hitting the photographic paper, except for some limited small areas where we allowed it through. Tools were often our hands or cardboard or plastic shapes cut out to more closely match the areas that needed local exposure adjustment. We moved these tools around to prevent hard edges that could show the results of manipulating exposure locally. That does not sound at all like what we do in post-processing, but the result is the same, so the names stuck.

Being pedantic is okay, but these are all terms that digital retouchers commonly use regardless of your view that exposure applies just to what happens at sensor level. Given that we see no comments on how this image was prepared, it could well be what the sensor recorded and the camera processed....

[Shadowman]

Very vibrant considering the theme, nicely captured.

[derekphil]

First, the image was created from a focus stack, not an exposure stack; apologies for not making this clear.
Replying to Manfred, lifting the midtones and highlights reduces the sense of decay that I was looking for, and makes it into a somewhat brighter, more cheerful image.
Regarding how the final image was created/manipulated in Pshop, is this relevant? What we are trying to achieve is a satisfying final image, and the route to that end is surely unimportant.
For the record, I processed in Lightroom and Photoshop, the usual levels/contrast/selective colour levels, etc, and burned some of the background.
An image of decay that I wanted to be low key and muted.
Many thanks for all the suggestions and comments. I'm a newcomer to CiC, and beginning to appreciate the feedback from this site.

[Manfred M]

Replying to Manfred, lifting the midtones and highlights reduces the sense of decay that I was looking for, and makes it into a somewhat brighter, more cheerful image.

Ensuring that the black point and white point are appropriately set and then varying the mid-point (I would use two different Photoshop curves adjustment layers) will give you the dark moodiness you are looking for as well as giving a fuller tonal range, which will give you more contrast and texture.

[pschlute]

I like it. Detail; colour; texture, it has it all.

[DanK]

A very interesting image. I do a fair amount of dead and dessicated plants, but this is a very different style of image than mine, which are generally brighly lit. So, this gives me something to mull over.

I think Manfred has managed to bring out the texture a bit more. This is apparent in the largest, middle petal.

It's not clear to me that the stack was entirely successful. It appears that the distance between frames may have been too large in at least one spot, with what appears to be a few blurry spots about midway between the front and the back. However, at this resolution, it's hard to tell whether this is blur or just a lack of texture in that part of the plant.

[derekphil]

Manfred's version:
A subtle difference, and better.
Thank you.
DanK: yes, there are gaps in the focus stack. I have a Fuji XT-2, which has focus stack as a feature, and I'm still playing with the settings.
Better next time? Of course.

[DanK]

I don't have a camera that will focus-stack on its own. I do have Helicon Remote, which is software that controls stacking if you shoot tethered. I have only used it a few times. However, I found that the default settings weren't correct. Once I fiddled with them, I found settings that worked well. I would guess that the same will be true of your camera.

Ignore if you aren't interested, but I have done a great deal of stacking over a period of years, so I 'll sketch what I do. There are a number of reasons that I haven't been interested letting a camera body stack on its own. One is that several I have heard about only produce JPEGs, which I don't want because of the loss of detail, etc. The second is that different stacking algorithms perform differently. I believe Helicon has 3. Zerene, which I use, has 2, and I find I need them both because they have different strengths and weaknesses. I generally use the method called DMax for flowers because it does better at preserving color, but it is also more prone to haloing from parallax, which can be a series problem with deep flowers (specifically, when there are edges that are a substantial distance, front to back, from the surface behind them). For that, PMax is superior. So, I often end up using both methods and touching up the DMax composite from the PMax one, which is very simple to do with Zerene.

I shoot the stack manually in raw and export the stack as 16-bit ProPhoto TIFFs into Zerene for stacking, which preserves detail. It sounds like a pain, but it is actually very easy to do, particularly if you use Lightroom, as Zerene installs a plug-in that allows you to export the entire stack directly into Zerene, using whatever color space, etc., you prefer. Once one sets up and saves the preferences, it is one menu command (file, export, Zerene) to create the TIFFs of an entire stack, call up Zerene, and move all the TIFFs into Zerene. From that point, it is only one mouse click to stack, although it can be a fair amount of work to clean up the composite when parallax halos show up.

Apart from unintended movement of the flower, I have found halos to be the single hardest part of this. I can usually remove most of them by touching up from a PMax composite to a DMax one. However, sometimes I have to use one of the individual images as a retouching source (also very easy in Zerene). Sometimes that isn't enough, and I have to do manual cloning in Photoshop. Even with all of that, I sometimes can't get 100% of it taken care of. It tends not to show as much online because images are small and low-resolution, but it shows up more in prints. For example, I am midway through printing 6 flower macros, all stacked, in sizes ranging from 13 x 19 (a bit larger than A3) to 17 x 22 (roughly A2), and I have had to re-edit all three. Two just required cleanup in Photoshop, but one set I had to re-stack from scratch to remove some smaller areas of halo.