Beauty In A Cluster

[selig1656]

P1020125 edited by Raymond Friedman, on Flickr

[purplehaze]

Pretty flowers, Raymond. I am wondering why some of the image is smooth and some of it kind of crunchy.

[selig1656]

Janis that was done with intent while shooting and PP.

[DanK]

Raymond,

Nice capture.

How did you process this? The processing doesn't work for me, for a couple of reasons.

First, it looks like you highly sharpened everything in the center, not just the flower. I'm guessing that because the center background is noisy--sharpening makes noise more apparent--and there are halos around some of the branches. There are a number of ways to avoid this. If you are sharpening in LR/ACR, one technique that helps a lot is to boost the masking slider a lot, often more than 50. If you hold the alt key while you are doing it, you will get a nice black and white image that clearly shows what's masked. You can usually do that to mask much of the background so that it isn't sharpened.

Second, the blur doesn't work for me. It doesn't look natural. It looks like you are blurring material that's the same distance from the camera, and the blur is strong and abrupt. You can see this if you follow to the left the line starting with the stem of the blurred flowers. Normally, blur builds gradually as you move back or forward from the point of focus. Speaking for myself, I find it quite hard to create natural-looking blur.

A shot like this might work better if you positioned yourself a bit to the right and turned counterclockwise. That would place the flowers you want to be out of focus a little farther back than the ones you want in focus. With this shot, since it's already done, I would try backing off the blur and blurring more gradually.

Dan

[Wavelength]

The graininess of the defocused area is a kind of disturbance i feel