February Spring Bognor Regis FinalFebruary Spring Bognor Regis

On Wednesday 26th February Spring made a brief appearance before the resumption of the deluge. I found a spread of Crocuses and Daffodils together at a small Green near Gossamer Lane roundabout on a beautiful sunny day. Last year I aquired a Sigma 28-80 zoom with a macro function at 80mm. This was a pretty good bargain at £42 on ebay and a cheap way to try out Macro

The picture was taken hanheld with a Sony A550 which has the benefit of a fold out screen for low shots like this one. I used one RAW image to create 2 extra exposures for a false HDR. The images were opened in Photoshop first and each image noise reduced with Noiseware Pro and saved as tiffs.

Photomatix

The 2 images at 2EV separation were outputted in Photomatix Detail Enhancer method Smooth preset with adjustments.

Photoshop

The 0EV image was opened and then copied in as a new layer. A black layer mask was used to exclude this. Then a white brush at 50% opacity was used to apply it to highlight areas to tone them down.

More detail was brought in especially to the foreground using Topaz Adjust clarity setting. The adjustment was used with a layer mask by first making a selection of the foreground area with the crocuses, inverting the selection and then adding a layer mask to create a layer mask excluding the background to keep this soft.

Layers flattened before going on to sharpening.

Duplicate layer Noiseware Pro.

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 43 amount and 43 radius. A layer mask was created from the

The clone brush was used to end leaves in the bottom left and right from going out of the picture and thus improve composition..

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

February Spring Bognor Regis OriginalFebruary Spring Bognor Regis

Tonemapped image

February Spring Bognor Regis TonemappedFebruary Spring Bognor Regis

Final Image

February Spring Bognor Regis FinalFebruary Spring Bognor Regis

For licences see February Spring Bognor Regis

Edwin Jones