Clover in a sand pit

The photo to the right was originally a fairly decent picture, but nothing spectacular.  By that I mean that it had decent placement, a good symmetry to the petals, and something to look at in regards to sharpness.  It looks much better after processing, though.

In this case, it didn’t take much.  First, I started in Adobe RAW.  Steps were roughly:

• Moved it to +1.3EV;
• Slid contrast to the right until there was decent contrast (whites are blown out);
• Moved recovery slider over to recover highlights;
• Reduced EV back to +.4;
• Moved up Clarity slightly, until petals jumped out again;

Then in to Photoshop:

• Open the NIK Viveza tool;
• Lower brightness on background areas with control points (4 points, large);
• Slightly increase saturation on rosy areas of clover with another control point, click OK;
• Merge layers on a new layer;
• Sharpen (with a luminosity layer, at 60% opacity);
• Add copyright, etc.;

Total time: 3 minutes.  Which is why I was willing to pay for NIK’s software – it saves that much time.