CCC Forum

Day 22 and not much time for photography, just sufficient to grab a few quick shots of this tulip.

Mmm... I find this a bit strange - have you extracted the background ?

I was thinking the same, almost looks cut/pasted onto a plain background?
There's an outline around the edge that catches the eye.

This is a straight shot, although there is a story behind it. When I converted the image from Raw in Lightroom, I could not get a pale background without overexposing the flower and Instead it was coming out dark grey. I tried the target adjustment brush for hue, saturation and lighness, but could not change the background colour in any way - the sliders simply did not move. Never mind, I thought, I'll use Replace Color in Photoshop. Except when I tried it, it left a black line around the tulip. I quite liked the effect, still do, as it heightened the slightly surreal colours of the bloom and I ran with it.

Incidentally, this is not an ACR issue since exactly the same thing happens with the background when I process the Raw file in Digital Professional Photo. I suspect that the cause is under exposure of the background, which is lighter than the flower. There are any number of ways which I could have got around the problem, such as multiple Raw conversions or a selection for the tulip before the replace color step.

Can you not specifically target the background/flower during raw conversion to only tweak that which you want, using the adjustment brush?

davidc wrote:Can you not specifically target the background/flower during raw conversion to only tweak that which you want, using the adjustment brush?

Yes, that is another possibility. I have experimented and it takes a bit of time to get everything right as the auto masking does not always detect the edges of the flower. With some extreme adjustments for colour temperature, exposure, highlights, shadows and saturation I was able to recreate the original background colour.