Editing Friday; What happened to Hyacinth?

So my Hyacinth is not doing so well after one week. For some reason the stem would not stay straight and then it met my cat. Kryton loves plants, so he was very interested in meeting Hyacinth.

Since it is Friday I thought I would take you though my editing workflow.

This was my starting point. I shot the plant with my daylight set up. The main light source was coming from a 45 degree angle on the left. A reflector was placed on the right side at about 20 degrees . The reflector was set up to highlight the details of the flowers and balance the light.
There are a few defects on the plant and the plant pot that need to be fixed. Areas in the background also need to be darkened while leaves of the plant need to be lightened.

I cropped and straightened the the image. I used a 5×4 crop ratio and straightened the image using the plant pot as a reference.

First I made my basic adjustments.  I started with colour balance, I set the colour balance to auto and then made adjustments by eye. I wanted the image a little bit warmer than auto with a more greenish tone than suggested.
The exposure generally wasn’t too bad but I did make adjustments to the white point. I then used highlights to preserve some details and I also raised shadows as well to bring out some extra details in the low midtones.
I made minimal adjustments to contrast but made a small adjustment to clarity (the midtone contrast)
I finally raised the vibrance and slightly raised the saturation.

The image had some noise and so I reduced using the noise adjustment panel, I also added a smaller amount of capture sharpening.

I changed the colour profile of the image.
Images in Camera Raw by default uses the Adobe colour profile but you can change it. There are many options, I chose camera neutral. This setting has slightly more pastel tones that worked well with the adjustments already made.
In practise I should choose my profile before I start my workflow as some changes already made maybe reversed now.

I adjusted the hue of the green for it to be less yellow and more green.

I finally made a curves adjustment. I lowered the midtones slightly and raised the highlights very carefully.

There is still some cleaning to be done but I will do this in Photoshop.

In Photoshop I added a new layer above my smart object and used a mixture of the clone, heal and patch tool.

I sharpened the image and reduced the noise more.

I finally added a new layer filled with 50% grey and set the blending to overlay. I used a soft brush and painted white and black onto the image to create areas of light and dark in the image. I wanted to lighten the leaves and darken areas of the stem as well as the right side of the background.

Final Image

I like the final image. Although I don’t know why the stem bent, I think it adds a personality to the image. It looks as if the leaves are fingers of a hand trying to lift the flower head which has fallen down.

I like the way the purple of the plant pot and the flowers have a similar tone. The background is dark but not to black so the leaves are not swamped by the background.

Let me know what you think. I have some more shots of Hyacinth that I will share in the coming posts.

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