Terry Campanella
About the Image(s)
I moved into my current South Florida community year and a half ago and although I always thought it was lovely, it was not until our shelter in place mandate did I really look closely at all that surrounds me. Each day on my walks, I have discovered all kinds of wonderful things to photograph. This magnolia tree is just down the street from me and is in its peak for blooms. Hope all of you are safe and well.
Taken with my Nikon D 5200 on Manual Mode, Lens 55-300; Focal Length 221.00 mm, Speed 1/1600 sec., F/6.3, ISO 100. Post editing was done in Photoshop. First, brought down the highlights just a bit and darkened the shadows. Next I used healing brush and clone tool to eliminate the large brown branch behind the flower. Then, I selected the flower with the elliptical tool, inverted my selection, and blurred the inverted selection. Finally I vignetted and cropped before adding the off white border.
My questions: Does the blurring look natural? Does the choice of crop work?
This round’s discussion is now closed!
13 comments posted
(Group 43)
You might try making a duplicate layer in Photoshop and blurring that entire layer. Then in the layer above, use Select Subject to isolate only the flower so you can delete all the greenery. As an alternative, you could use the erase brush to remove the greenery from the top layer, thereby exposing only the blurred leaves. (For my image this month, I ended up using a combination of the two approaches to get the subject clearly separated from the blurred background.) Other people might know of a more efficient technique.   Posted: 05/02/2020 22:16:22
(Group 43)
(Group 43)
  Posted: 05/19/2020 15:54:32
I would, however, clone out all the blurred leaves and then crop off the left side, so the flower isn't in the center with nothing to the left. I think the blurred leaves distract from the most important element, the flower and the leaves cradling it.
And just to give credit where it's due, you wrote "Joan" to the comment from Bunny.   Posted: 05/18/2020 14:56:08
The photo after Bunny's comments has another problem. The whole blurred background has blurred also the edges of the flower, looking like an optical error. With respect to that I like the first possibility more.
Border is good, but this flower I would crop in the center. Central composition means statics and this flower is that.   Posted: 05/19/2020 15:02:53