Sunflower

This is an example of image retouching I would like to share. This picture was taken using a small studio with natural light coming through a window during a sunny day in Brazil. The camera was a Nikon D100 (quite old but still very useful if you are not a professional photographer), mounted on a strong Manfrotto tripod. I shot it in Raw (Nef). See below the final image and click on it to see some steps from the original Raw file. Hope you enjoy.

It basically consisted in these techniques: colour and saturation controls for each part of the flower, adding some new petals and removing other parts (if you compare the images you can easly find them), some advanced sharpen, contrast controls for each range of lightness and saturation in the image, some noise and oriented surface textures that are best seen in the last image.

Original image

Intermediate step

Detail

Can you see the “extra” petal in this zoomed in image?