White Wild Flower

This was a photo I took a while ago — back before my days of SLR. I was using an ultra-zoom at the time, but it worked out fine for most things. This photo was taken in North Idaho (back home), and I sat on it for the longest time because it just didn't do anything for me. It's some kind of wild flower, but I don't know what it's called and I'm too lazy to find out. Actually, it's probably more of a weed than anything. They're all over the place out there and I've seen them in a couple of different colors. I took the shot straight down into this flower, but unfortunately I framed it right in the center (1). That's probably why I didn't do anything with it for a while — it wasn't really eye catching. But then I got a little creative with it.

White Wild Flower

I started off by setting the composition a little better. A square crop (2) seemed to suit it a little more nicely, but I left the flower in the center because it seemed to work better that way. I was on a black & white kick, so I used a black & white adjustment layer (3) in Adobe Photoshop CS3. I set it to 0% red, 0% yellow, 0% green, 110% cyan, 110% blue, and 110% magenta. This turned the green/yellow background nearly black while making the purple/blue flower almost white. Then I did a curves adjustment layer (4) with an “S” curve that was a bit heavy on the dark side, but I still brightened the highlights some too. The last thing I did was a little sharpening and the addition of vignette (5) to soften the corner midtones and highlights some. Given what I started with, I was pretty happy with the outcome.

White Wild Flower

Photo by Brian Auer
06/05/05 Post Falls, ID
White Wild Flower
Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3
62mm equiv * f/3.2 * 1/40s * ISO64