A Day in Spring 30th April Final

Last Tuesday was a warm sunny spring day so I took a bike ride in my local area ending up at the small villages of Singleton and West Dean in the South Downs National Park, West Sussex coast, UK.

I had the SLR camera with me and the objective was to take pictures of flowers in the one day to go into a composite. Taking Tulip and daffodil pictures outside in one day would not normally be possible so this photo is curtsey of the cold start to spring.

The tulips were taken at the entrance to West Dean gardens and the Daffodils and Blossom back at Bognor Regis

The pictures were taken handheld with a Sony A550 with a Sony 15-56 zoom.   For the Tulips one RAW image was opened in Photoshop Camera RAW first to create 2 extra exposures for HDR at 2EV separation. The Daffodils and Blossom just had a little RAW editing.

Photomatix

From the original Tulips picture 3 images at 2EV separation were outputted in Photomatix.

Photoshop

Topaz adjust was used to bring in an additional detail using vibrant preset group and Crisp preset

The daffodils picture was intentionally taken out of focus with a view to going into the background of this picture. The image was pasted into the Tulips picture as a new layer at 100% opacity and then a layer mask used to restrict it to the top of the image. Blending at the edges was done with varying brush opacity.

The blossom picture was pasted in as another new layer at 65% opacity and a layer mask and brush used to restrict it to the left of the image

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. To keep most of the picture soft this effect was restricted with a layer mask and brush to just the main tulip

The clone tool was used for tidy up.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Below are the Before and After images. First the tonemapped Tulips image. Then the out of focus Daffodils picture, then the Blossom picture and then the final result.

Tulips image

A Day in Spring 30th April Tulips Tonemapped

Daffodils image

A Day in Spring 30th April Daffodils

Blossom image

A Day in Spring 30th April Blossom

Final Image

A Day in Spring 30th April Final

For licence see A Day in Spring 30th April

Edwin Jones