Boxgrove Churchyard Snowdrops Final

Last Tuesday was a brief spell of warm spring weather before the return of winter. I made the most of it with a ride to nearby Boxgrove Priory and Church close to Chichester and the South Downs National Park.

The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A550 with a Tamron 28-200 zoom at 28mm.   One RAW image was opened in Photoshop Camera RAW first to create 2 extra exposures for HDR at 2EV separation. Each image was noise reduced with Noiseware Pro and saved as tiffs. 

Photoshop

Topaz adjust was used to bring in a more detail. A layer mask was used to apply the effect only to the area of the snowdrops to bring these out from the background. This was in addition to the use of an f5 aperture for a narrow depth of field when taking the picture.

The brightness tool was used with a layer mask to reduce brightness only on the side of the gravestone on the far right. This was to cut down the distraction of an over bright distracting area on the edge. The burn tool was also used later to bring down brightness further in that area.

Vibrance was increased slightly by 31 points.

Saturation blues was decreased slightly for a more natural look in the sky.

Layers flattened before going on to sharpening.

Duplicate layer Noiseware Pro and a little sharpening.

Second duplicate layer with mask to apply extra sharpening and contrast with low amount and high radius using Unsharp mask (Clarity Effect) The settings were 40 amount and 40 radius. A layer mask was again used to exclude this effect from everything except the snowdrops, again to bring out and separate the snowdrops from the rest of the image.

The burn tool was used to tone down over bright areas in parts of the background and some of the snowdrops. The clone tool was used to tidy up some parts arising from the masks.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Below are the Before and After images. First the original. Then the tonemapped image and then the final result.

Original at 0EV

Boxgrove Churchyard Snowdrops Original

Tonemapped image

Boxgrove Churchyard Snowdrops Tonemapped

Final Image

Boxgrove Churchyard Snowdrops Final

For licence see Boxgrove Churchyard Snowdrops

Edwin Jones