About the Image(s)

Taken with a 90 mm macro lens, handheld, natural light, f5.6, ISO 500, 1/80 sec shutter speed

This is a hibiscus planted in a container on my balcony. The sun was just coming up and this flower was beginning to open and unfurl in the morning light. It evoked a feeling of waking up refreshed and stretching out to take in the sun to begin a beautiful day. I loved how the light was hitting the edges of the petals with slight shadows within the flower. I wanted to enhance the beauty of the flower and the swirly movement of the petals as it was reaching for the sun.

Although the center was dark in my viewfinder, I wanted to maintain as much detail as possible on the petals without blowing out the bright spots and didn’t want to introduce too much noise with a really high ISO. I knew I could open up the shadows in the center effectively with Lightroom. I have heard that the current version of Lightroom has a new AI noise reduction feature, but I haven’t tried it out yet. So, I opted to deal with the dark center only.

Here are my edits:

Lightroom - cropped, used a mask with a radial gradient to open the shadows on just the center. Increased the overall exposure and contrast a bit, added a mask to select the background and darken it to make the flower pop more, reduced the highlights just a bit, slightly increased the texture.

Topaz Studio 2 - applied and adjusted a smudge filter to add some additional movement to the texture of the petals. I painted the filter effects off of the stigma in the center of the flower.

Photoshop - I added a slight stroke around the edges of the image so it would stand out better after uploading to PSA.

Even though I darkened the background, I wanted to leave how the light was starting to hit some of the bottom leaves as well, hoping to give the image a little more depth. Not sure if those light spots left in are effective or distracting.