I wanted to get back to my semi-high key wood anemones from Sunday. I liked the composition in this one with the foreground flower asymmetrically mirrored in the oof flower on the right (if it’s possible to ”asymmetrically mirror” anything?), plus the open white space above. In Lightroom, I muted the colour in the leaves by increasing brightness (I didn’t want to desaturate because it just adds grey and it didn’t work in my eye), and then used a brush to selectively increase and decrease clarity. Some cloning and healing was also involved in the process because there were some stray petals sticking into the frame which I thought distracted too much, and the whole thing was finished off with a white vignette. A whole lot more post-processing than I normally do, but I guess it’s the joy of the flower season that inspired me!

I must say that I’m happy with the result, with reservation for the degree of whiteness in the background, because strictly speaking, it’s not white – it’s light grey, with perhaps a dose of yellow in the form of oof flowers. However, if I were to make it white then the main flower would be totally lost, so keeping the grey helps to lift the topmost petals. It really comes down to presentation; this picture should never be shown against a white background, nor should be it mounted with a white frame, LOL! I hope that the Lightbox plugin works for you so the picture opens in the dark frame… the default white browser window rarely does any favours to any picture, for that matter.