Pretty Rose, for a Pretty Girl

[Turningpoint]

I'm going to be entering a photography competition in my area and would love to get critiques on everything I have. I'll be posting maybe once a week to fix each photo the best I can. Please note that I never edit any of my pictures in any way, so this is just the raw image straight from my camera. Thanks for your comments and tips.

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[RoverDriver]

I like the light the color, and the waviness of the line of flowers. Maybe I would add a bit of sharpening but the only composition flaw I see is that the first flower is not fully in the frame. Also, to a lesser extent, the distant flowers on the top right would look better with a tiny bit more room around them.

Paolo

[Grandpa]

I think the reds are over saturated to the point of being blown. You've lost all the detail in the rose petals.

[Turningpoint]

Thanks for your input.

When I took this, the bush was right beside my grandmother's house, so I barely had any room to take the shot. I couldn't even see the preview on my camera until after I took a shot.

What program would you suggest to adjust the sharpness and possibly take away just a little of the redness/brightness?

[RoverDriver]

There are a number of image manipulation programs available. There is a section of this forum that has some pointers: Photo Editing & Image Management There are pointers to free software that allows these adjustments. There might be some settings on the camera itself that would allow increasing the sharpness and reducing the color saturation. Besides my Nikon D7000 I also have a Casio Exilim EX-F1 and in the menu settings (under quality) there are two items: sharpness and saturation. I don't remember if my Exilim came with some software to do some adjustments. Since you likely saved the image as JPEG, you will be limited in the amount of changes you can make.

If you shot in the blind, that was a really lucky shot!

Paolo

[TCampbell]

I like the detail on the flower petals and buds. Compositionally I wish the rose wasn't cut off on the bottom -- also you're showing the rose in profile and I wish the camera had been just an inch or so higher and angled down slightly to provide more of a view across the top of the rose. It would help provide more of a 3D perspective on the rose rather than the relative 2D-ness of a profile view.

The petals on the right edge of the rose provide some nice detail of the structure in the petal. Elsewhere it's a bit more difficult to see the detail and structure -- which is what I think Grandpa was also pointing out.

I see that your focal ratio as f/2.8 even though the background roses are defined more than one would expect for an f/2.8 focal ratio -- that's mostly due to the limitations of a small lens & sensor of a point & shoot type camera (not much you could do to correct that other than use a different camera) but a softer background would have helped the rose "pop" a bit more.

[twinkle_turnip]

I think the reds are over saturated to the point of being blown. You've lost all the detail in the rose petals.

What program would you suggest to adjust the sharpness and possibly take away just a little of the redness/brightness?

As you may already know, an image file - including those generated by the camera - consist of three black and white images that represent red, green and blue. Just as all of these channels can become over exposed, resulting in what we normally think of when we think of over exposure - so can one channel if it pushed all the way to it's maximum.

This is what you have here, red is certainly over exposed while blue may be under exposed (resulting in too much yellow).

This can happen when the color is too vibrant for the sensor, though that isn't quite as likely - but possible. If that is the case, you could under expose and just increase the exposure in your RAW editor (not recommended) or use a cyan-colored optical filter, which you cut red and while increasing blue.

What is more likely is that this was done in your camera's post processing, either within a color effect (such as "vibrant") or if the color temperature was not set properly (too low). If this is the case, then shooting RAW would solve the problem as you can adjust color temperature and correction after the exposure was taken.

As it stands, there isn't a lot that you can do to fix this as there just isn't detail there in the first place. It may be possible to rebuild the luminance from the green channel, but that's getting into some pretty advanced channel chopping.