February Spring Crocus Bloom FinalFebruary Spring Crocus Bloom

This shot was taken on Tuesday 17^th February which was very springlike with unbroken sunshine and temperatures up to 10C or 50F. The location was a small green off the Aldwick Road in Bognor Regis, UK. The crocus there were the first I have seen this year.

The camera used was a Sony A550 with a Sigma 28-80 zoom with a macro function at 80mm. Taken on a Tripod.

Taking

The 20 images were taken using manual focusing and small adjustments of the focus ring.

Photoshop

I took RAW and JPEGs but used the JPEGs and copied these to a separate folder.

The next step was in Photoshop to go to file – Automate – Photomerge. In the next window I browsed to the folder for the images. On the defaults I left it on Auto but deselected blend images together and made sure all the options at the bottom of the window were deselected. Click OK and when Photoshop is done all the images will be open as separate layers. Next select all the layers Control plus A or Command plus A on Mac. Next go to Edit and select Auto Blend Layers and from the window select Stack Images. Photoshop then proceeds to select  and stack images using the sharpest part of each image and creating layer masks for each image layer. Photoshop aligns the images automatically to compensate for small movement from the wind.

If there is more movement it might be necessary to crop a fair bit but there was very little in this case. I did though crop for better composition.

I made a selection of just the crocus and saved it for future use with layer masks. Extra detail and vibrance was brought in using Topaz Adjust HDR.

Topaz denoise to remove a small amount of noise.

Saturation yellows increased a little.

Levels used to brighten a little and a brush on a layer mask used to remove the effect from brighter areas .

Unsharp mask 24 amount 24 radius for an extra clarity effect.

The original had a good out of focus background but I used Photoshop Lens Blur applied with a layer mask to the background only to bring it down more.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Below are the Before and After images. First the original being one of the 20 images. Then the final focus stacked image.

Original

February Spring Crocus Bloom OriginalFebruary Spring Crocus Bloom

Final focus stacked Image

February Spring Crocus Bloom FinalFebruary Spring Crocus Bloom

For licences see http://edwinjonesphotography.com

Edwin Jones