I had shot and PP'd this cactus in a very different way but I was concerned that one of my techniques, swapping out a pure white background for black might cause a problem - a SC member confirmed this, so I reshot.
Here the cactus has been placed in a glass egg-cup which is sat on black paper which has a hole cut in it. The whole lot is on a light box.
The camera was above on a tripod facing down.
During the 20 second exposure, I gave a quick paint of light to each of the 5 limbs with a Maglite torch to supplement the paltry backlighting.
In post processing, I rotated and cropped, changed the hue of the green to red and then desaturated the other colours with Aperture 2. I then round-tripped it to PS CS4 to run Neat Image and Smart Sharpen.
Back in Aperture 2, I used the repair tool to tidy up some bright corners and then used the Dodge and Burn plug-in to desaturate some of the edge of the cactus.
Resized to 720 X 720 at a quality <200K. I think this had introduced some nastiness into the background but hopefully it hasn't spoilt it too much.
Here is the original offering that I tried out with a Site Council member:
(Exposure, contrast and saturation was ramped up in Aperture 2. I then round-tripped it to PhotoShop CS4, changed the background from white to black, softened the edge of the cactus and used the Smart Sharpen filter.
Finally, selections were made of each of the limbs of the cactus, and the hue of each changed. The green limb went unaltered.
I then returned the image to Aperture 2 and removed the few bright pixels that emerged from the above process and then saved the resultant image as JPEG.
Job done)
Statistics
Place: 24 out of 87 Avg (all users): 5.8323 Avg (commenters): 6.6250 Avg (participants): 5.5455 Avg (non-participants): 5.9459 Views since voting: 2814 Views during voting: 294 Votes: 155 Comments: 21 Favorites: 1 (view)
I liked how this was an in-your-face kind of photo. The background color really complements the star color. Great capture of textures too. I love how it looks like it is just kind of hovering in the air.
Pretty cool. I Googled 'Bishop's Cap Cactus': too bad you didn't find one with it's flowers. That would have been awesome! As is, the edit is just slightly strange and not natural looking to me. I still like it: 8
This is an interesting plant, but it looks overly sharpened or something; maybe it really does look like that. I had to Google it to find out, and it looks like the texture is pretty accurate but you did some major colorizing. It's an interesting background. You met the challenge creatively.
hmm, i like the composition, but the photo lacks a certoin pop needed, maybe a more contrast around the background against the flwoer. either way. intersting
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
