Greasepaint for a Daffodil

A look at some post-processing tools and techniques

This is the season for daffodils. These bright signs of spring are everywhere. You probably ask, “but Ludwig, these gorgeous blossoms are beautiful in their own right, they don’t need theatrical makeup”. Indeed they don’t, but photographs of daffodils, like any others, will always benefit from some careful post-processing. This article is not about greasepaint but PaintShop Pro, my favorite tool for post-processing. Let’s walk through a session with a flower photo to give you an idea of what can be done, and maybe some hints that will help in your own photography.

The first step is to get the photo into PSP, PaintShop Pro. The beauty of this tool is that it is not require the photo file to be imported and locked into permanent embrace by this tool. You can organize your photos anyway you like, keep them in any storage locations of your way of organizing your pictures.

To start, just drag the thumbnail image from your organizer and drop it on the desktop shortcut for PSP.

For RAW files, PSP calls one of several pre-processors. In this case I am using a HEIC file from my iPhone which PSP handles directly.

Usually my first step is to use the crop tool to adjust the composition and layout. PSP offers the usual preset aspect ratios and composition gridlines. Here I will select the 4:3 ratio and position the blossom to my liking.

Next I always make a duplicate in the layer pane. Working on a copy of the image makes it easier to go back to the original whenever that is needed.

Now for some basic corrections. For many images it is desirable to reduce the noise, especially if they were taken at higher ISO settings. For this image it isn’t really necessary, but I will use the build in One Step Noise Removal tool. This is not the best noise reduction tool available, but it does a decent job.

The Smart Photo Fix… is a really nice way to make basic exposure corrections. For most photos the default adjustments are all that is needed. The result is often a tad too bright for me. The top Exposure slider is usually all that I use to make as I like it.

Now the fun begins. Daffodils are delicate flowers. In photos the bright yellow areas can lack textual detail. The background can show too much of it due to the wide depth of field of the short focal length lenses in smartphones. My next step here is to separate the flower and background.

PSP has a set of selection tools. For this image Auto Selection works fine. I set the Feather to 0 for this demo. Then I draw the selection box around the flower and release the mouse button. The “walking ants” show me that the selection is good.

Now I click Selections in the menu bar and then select Promote Selection to Layer. This results in a layer with just the flower image which will be highlighted, selected, in the layers pane. I click the layer below and then Selections again to get to the Invert option. With this the area outside the blossom is now selected. And I also promote this selection to a new layer.

Normally I don’t like to edit selections directly when I can do so easier in layers. I Select None. Now I have my new layers, the blossom and the background.

Since the layer with the background is already selected, I go right to the next step which is to blur the details there.

Adjust > Blur > Gaussian Blur… is what I use. For this demo I set the Radius to 60. Higher than I would normally use, but this is greasepaint, after all.

Then I select the top layer and duplicate it so I have two layers of just the blossom.

Now it is time to enhance the detail in the blossom. This is similar to the “frequency separation” technique used in portrait retouching. The quick way I will use here is Effects > Edge Effects > High Pass.

Again I will exaggerate and set the Radius to 15. OK and I have just the fine detail in the top layer of my stack of images. By itself this looks ugly gray with some tiny variations.

Next this “data” layer in combined with the layer below using the Blend Mode set to Hard Light. Then I merge this layer down – right click > Merge > Merge Down.

Next I merge this layer down as well so I will have just three layers left, the modified one, the first copy and the original image.

The little Visibility Toggle lets me show you the final image and the original one.

Looks pretty good, doesn’t it. There is one little annoyance, That bright smudge on the lower right edge. Let’s tone that down with a bit of darkening. A vignette all around will put the viewer’s attention more on the flower.

Now all that is left is to save the edited version as my masterpiece.

Here is what it looks like.

Lagniappe

I had totally forgotten to save an image of the cropped, but unedited, version of this photo. Showing it with the Image Compare option here in WordPress is a neat way to show and see the differences. So, I loaded the original file back into PaintShop Pro 2023. I clicked the crop tool and instantly it brought up the last setting. All I had to do was click the apply-checkmark and the do a Save As.

As you can see, I am a fan of PSP and have been since it was introduced many years ago.

.:. © 2024 Ludwig Keck