Delicate wings...

[Kaye]

I love the intricacy of macro, but know that this wing can be improved. Any edits apreciated.

3729

http://www.proudphotography.com/gallery/watermark.php?file=11857&size=1

[DoctorJazz]

Here's my attempt.....just used adjustment brush to increase contrast and clarity in
selected parts of wings and tweaked highlights very slightly to add to the effect.
Very cool photo....thanks for the opportunity!

[Pat]

Hi Kaye.
I oversharpened it on a new layer then reduced the opacity of that layer to 75% to cut back the sharpening "glare".

[Kaye]

Here's my attempt.....just used adjustment brush to increase contrast and clarity in
selected parts of wings and tweaked highlights very slightly to add to the effect.
Very cool photo....thanks for the opportunity!

Nice edit thanks Sandy.

[Kaye]

Hi Kaye.
I oversharpened it on a new layer then reduced the opacity of that layer to 75% to cut back the sharpening "glare".

Nice work Pat. You're an expert at this stuff! The clarity of the wing is great.

[coffee]

Hi Kay and thanks for the opportunity.

[Kaye]

Thank you so much for this Joseph. An amazing transformation.
The colour is pretty much the real colour of this insect.

[DoctorJazz]

Wow....Joseph's edit is a great reminder of the look you were after Kaye.....the key
word being "delicate".....beautifully expressed!

[StephenK]

I'm glad you moved this picture over to this section Kaye. When I saw it earlier I was curious as to what would be involved
in creating a mask for it using channels. It's so complex and delicate that manually making a mask would take a very long time indeed!

I played around a bit and found this combination.

Using Calculations (Image>Calculations)I poked around until this combination cropped up. I'm posting a screen shot of the Calculations settings... along with the mask that it made.

I still had to do some manual alterations to the mask, using another layer (the mask included is unaltered) to get it
this far. And more work would be needed to make it perfect, but at least this way we're not starting from scratch...

Thanks for posting this Kaye... doing so got me motivated to try this... ^)

[Kaye]

Stephen, thanks for this. It is great - so well done. You are very clever with edits. This little insect looks beautiful on the sand and the wing is crystal clear.

Already I spend hours editing the many photos I still have waiting, and it will take many more to try out some of these instructions. I will get around to it in time. I didn't even know "calculations" existed, but did find it on CS2!

[StephenK]

Already I spend hours editing the many photos I still have waiting, and it will take many more to try out some of these instructions. I will get around to it in time. I didn't even know "calculations" existed, but did find it on CS2!

Here's another angle Kaye that I just learned in more detail tonight and am blown-away by how promising this is!
It's probably further down the learn curve than you're wanting to take-on at the moment but at least you'll know
to look for it later...!

This is using the Blend-if option found in the Layer Style window. The Layer Style window comes-up if you double click on the
bug icon in the Layers panel.

I'm including a screen capture of both the Layer Style window and what I did with this image in the Layers panel.

This was sooooo much quicker than using the Channels Masks!

The "Blend-if" option is in the center of the Layer Style window and down at the bottom. In this case it's two blue bars.... the reason being
is that the blue channel had the best contrast for the bug.

Wow, this is hard to explain but so worth knowing!

I was working with the Top of the two "Blend-if" blue bars. There's a white slider at the right that you can pull over
and see the whiter parts of the bug disappear. If you Alt-Click on that slider you can then split it in two, and feather
the results of the effect. The settings I have here are 90 and 173, for the white slider.

I added the top layer of the bug in the Layers window in order to mask back in parts of the bug I was wanting to keep.
And added a mask to the Blend-if layer to go after some of the more stubborn shadow.

This whole thing only took a few seconds to do... compared to the Channels mask version I did of this earlier, which took
me about 20 minutes or so. It could still use a little touching-up, but the core of it's done!

Sorry about tossing another heavy your way but somewhere down the road I want to make sure that you look
for this effect..... it's simply amazing! :^)

[Kaye]

Stephen, your above edits are just magnificent! There seems to be unlimited things that one can do with Photoshop - it's just a matter of finding them as you have done.

Thank you so much for passing on all this info.
I will certainly try to spend some time trying to work on your suggestions in both of your posts (first one first)... but I will probably need a tutor looking over my shoulder that I can call on for help every few minutes!

I do have a few other shots that you and perhaps other members may be interested in trying out an edit. If you don't have time - don't worry. I don't need to use them for anything. I just take them for the practice.
The background is just a cement block - we don't always get the choice of background with these bugs! I believe this one is a type of Dragon Fly. (Bit boring in colour but I shot them for the wings).

Perhaps you can take the better/clearer parts of say the body of one shot and add it to the wings of another........!!
They are all the same Dragon Fly shot in my garage on 2 different days. I then felt sorry for him and let him climb onto a tissue in hope that I may be able to place him on a plant for a better background, but of course he was happy to be free and flew off....

3936 I did a 3 minute edit on this one.

3937 This is the original of my above edit.... These bottom 4 shots are all straight from my camera at night with no flash (obviously), just overhead light. (I cannot use flash with macro on my camera).

3938 3939 3940 HAVE FUN !

[StephenK]

Thanks Kaye :^)

I was looking at the new images you posted and went looking for a textured background and then asked myself why I
was trying to re-invent the wheel?! The texture within the existing concrete is quite nice as it is!

So I grabbed the head from one image, extended the antennas through cloning and cloned the concrete
extensively to fill-in the background....

What a gorgeous specimen this is! Thank you for posting it! :^)

[StephenK]

As a quick follow-up.... you can review some of these more advanced techniques at Lynda.com for free....!

In this case they offer the first chapter of a DVD on this subject as a tease....

Here's the link to the actual DVD online. :^)

http://www.lynda.com/home/DisplayCourse.aspx?lpk2=506

[Kaye]

Thanks again for all this Stephen. I certainly have a lot of learning/catching up before I have your wonderful editing capabilities. I have saved all the information for my reference.

[wehrmacher]

Hi Kaye,

Great shot. I have tried some macro photography and I must give you major kudos for this shot.

My suggestion would be to soften the light. A larger light source would, I believe, do two things. First, it would reduce the glare on the wing which may the issue you were alluding to in your question. Second, it would soften the shadow. The shadow is great in that it gives some depth to the image, but it could be softer.

I do recognize that flattening the light is probably very difficult with such a small subject, but as you were asking for suggestions, here is one that is not Photoshop based.

Great work.

Best of everything,

Bill

[Kaye]

Thanks Bill for your good suggestions.
I am not quite sure exactly which image you are referring to (or perhaps all of them). The last one above is an edit by StephenK with the blue background.

I know my lighting was not good, but this insect just decided to land somewhere with not great light, and I cannot use flash with macro. If he had landed on top of my table I have an adjustable lamp set up.

I look forward to seeing some of your macros - the more you post the more you will learn from other members.