January 2, 2009

Christmas Cactus

No series of photos from the Patrick household during the holidays would be complete without one of a Christmas cactus.  JD has many of them.  This one was the one that I thought had the most interesting color and shape.   It is setting on our screened-in back porch where we tend to spend a lot of our time.

The shot was pretty straight-forward, so I wanted to do something a little funky with the post processing. I wanted the colors of the flowers to come forward and the background to more-or-less fade away.  Hope you enjoy the effect.

Camera settings:  Nikon D3, 17-35 f/2.8 at 17mm, shot at ISO 200, f/22 and 3 seconds.

Post Processing: 

Lightroom—set white and black point, and added mid-tone contrast, added clarity.  

Photoshop—duplicated background layer and applied nik Color Efex Pro tone contrast and color saturation filter to only the flowers (masked everything but flowers), merged layers and applied nik Silver Efex Pro to convert to black & white, masked flowers using black brush set at 40% and then set the opacity of the layer to 33%, merged the layers and then sharpened only the flowers using the high pass filter in the soft light mode at an opacity of 40%, added a mid-tone contrast curve to entire image, and added a six pixel black stroke 

Five "around the house" photos down, and none to go. Hope you enjoyed the series. Now, go out there and shoot around your house!

1 comment:

  1. I think you might have over-funked this one. A little out there from your normal stuff.
    Debbie

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