Slindon Village Daffodils Final

Last Saturday was sunny and warm, not a tunnels day so I took a bike ride round my local area ending up at the small village of Slindon near the South Downs, West Sussex coast, UK.

I wanted to take Daffodil pictures but find them a difficult subject especially in getting one flower to stand out from the bunch and to do something different. I went for a view looking up and into the light with the branches of a tree in the background. I added to this some quite heavy HDR processing.

The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A550 with a Sony 15-56 zoom at 45mm.   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. 

Photomatix

The 3 images at 2EV separation were outputted in Photomatix Fusion and Painterly 5 preset.

Photoshop

Topaz adjust was used to bring in an additional effect.The HDR sketch preset was used to remove detail from the tree branches.

Another picture was opened, the same Topaz effect applied and then a selection of 2 daffodils was pasted in on the right of the picture to improve the overall balance and compostion.

Levels used to enhance.

Saturation yellows increased by 91 points to bring up the yellows in the flowers which was washed out by shooting into the light.

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 38 amount and 38 radius.

The clone tool was used for tidy up and to remove flare from the top left

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

Slindon Village Daffodils Original

Tonemapped image

Slindon Village Daffodils Tonemapped

Final Image

Slindon Village Daffodils Final

For licence see Slindon Village Daffodils

Edwin Jones