*Hello from Sid and the Critique Club*
An appealing flower study.
A fairly straightforward flower shot that includes all of the plant detail but the lighting is such that it has created some strong contrasts causing some problems with shade and highlights. I like that you have resisted the urge to saturate as is often the case and opted for a more subtle approach, for me that works well. You have already questioned the frame yourself, from me, an emphatic no, I would have preferred it without.
Your focus is towards the top of the plant with a shallow DOF that sees the lower half fading into soft focus which is fine and works well, however, because of the shadow problem the focussed top half is least visible as opposed to the lower half.
I see you have asked for some PS feedback, for myself I always try to minimise the post processing so I am far from being an in-depth user but I will try and give you my workflow for the image. I hope you shot in RAW? The bulk of my adjustments would be in ACR (Adobe Camera Raw). I would look carefully at the histogram and start off with the auto adjustment which is sometimes sufficient on its own but if not I would tweak the sliders until I got a good even distribution of the histogram. As part of that process I would imagine I would have used some fill light to bring detail into the top half and I would have probably used recovery slider to reduce the blown highlights.
In PS my emphasis is always on getting the very best quality as opposed to fancy this that and the other filters or whatever, the danger is that you get carried away and far removed from the essential qualities within the image. I may have used hue and saturation to lightly subdue the colours a little and I may have used curves to make sure the most important parts of the image are being rendered at their best. I rarely sharpen I would prefer an unsharpened image to an over-sharpened one every day, halos are so unsightly and often ruin some otherwise brilliant images. So there we are, like I said my post processing is always minimal.
I hope this helps, thank you for your submission Arna Marie (what a lovely name), good luck, Sid |
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