So I was tapped to wrap a little (may) birthday gift recently.
The first non-xmas paper I found was this pretty mauve stuff, and it dictated the rest of the color scheme. —In fact, it was used, originally to wrap a christmas gift, and, if you look closely there's a metallicized pink snowflake incorporated into this piece.
Here's sort of a romanticized shot of it. (I.e. cropped, floral background.) Shot with an olympus E620, 50mm zuiko macro prime, on 1may12 using available (cloudy) light.
Aside from scaling, the image is just shown ‘as is’. —It's exactly the sort of thing that would be fun to shoot with a lensbaby setup. Which I have finally broken down and ordered, only after thinking about it 3 or 4 years.
Just for kicks I did some post processing on this next image. My usual MO is apply the curves tool, but I really only wanted to lighten up the (silk) leaves—not the bottom of the box, the deck or the background (my tree peony, if you cared.) So I tried using the wand tool, and wonder of wonders, after adjusting a little, it selected the dark leaves. With a bit of growing (5 or 10 pixels) and some feathering (50 pixels) I then was able to lighten and brighten the leaves a little. And I think it really does improve the image:
The styling is more conventional in this post-processed version
In a perfect world, I would have figured out how to make a graduated mask, but I just settled for reducing the opacity of the graduation and clicking on ‘burn’ —and that lightened the leaves up. Between the reduced opacity and the feathering, the edge artifacts don't look too awful.
But you don't have to take my word for it: I provide the original below, and you can compare them yourself.
Original version. I like the rich blacks the camera default gives me, but those leaves to the side of the big carnation are a bit much, even for me.
Happy Spring, everyone.
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
