Butterflys love this stuff

[Gary W Brown]

Although there are no butterflies here, they really enjoy this plant's flowers.
It's not too late for the butterfly so I may get a lucky shot. Gary

P S It had rained softly all day and there are still droplets on the petals.

[rjlittlefield]

I like this a lot. Nice colors and good control of the gradations, good DOF.

One slightly weak point, for me the detail junkie, is that the image gives me the impression of being in search of sharpness, but not quite making it. Everything seems a little softer in the image than it probably was in real life. I think I'd be happier if you added some sharpening for just the finest details. In Photoshop, that would be an Unsharp Mask with say 0.7 pixel Radius, and maybe 50% Amount. This is very personal -- other people might prefer it as is.

--Rik

[Gary W Brown]

Thanks for the compliments and encouragement Rik. I did the applications you suggested. One thing I noticed as I looked again at the photo was the fading of the colors from the original. From my camera the photo goes to iPhoto (a holding folder for me) and then to Photoshop for resizing. I did not do anything to the first post except resize it. I haven't noticed this on the other photos I've posted.

[rjlittlefield]

I did the applications you suggested.

Hhmm... I got curious when I couldn't see any difference, so I looked harder. What I found is that these two images have different names, but they are exactly the same size and actually are bit-for-bit identical. It seems that something went wrong when you applied the suggestion and re-did the upload.

One thing I noticed as I looked again at the photo was the fading of the colors from the original. From my camera the photo goes to iPhoto (a holding folder for me) and then to Photoshop for resizing. I did not do anything to the first post except resize it. I haven't noticed this on the other photos I've posted.

That is unusual.

One possibility is that the original image was shot in something other than sRGB color profile, and then the profile info was stripped without converting the pixel values to match.

I checked the currently posted image files. They do not contain color profiles. If I assign an "Adobe RGB" profile, then the colors get much more intense. Of course I have no idea if they are then correct.

I suggest to pull one of your original images into Photoshop and see what it says. The place to go is Image | Mode | Assign Profile... A dialog box will pop up showing three radio buttons, with labels like "Don't Color Manage This Document", "Working RGB: sRGB IEC61966-2.1", and "Profile: [many possibilities]".

If your original images have that third button highlighted, then they will have to be converted to sRGB in order to be correctly displayed by browsers. There are probably several ways to do that. The one I know is to explicitly Image | Mode | Convert to Profile... , and be sure that the Destination Space is sRGB.

Hope this helps. Color management can be a tricky subject.

--Rik

[Gary W Brown]

Thanks Rik,
I think my Photoshop Elements is too simple for your suggestions and my abilities are quite basic. I followed your prompt and Photoshop said I had RGB. After that nothing else matched so I deleted my first two attempts and tried again. This time I first applied the unsharpen and then re-sized the photo. Here is my latest effort. This one is also slightly less saturated (I hope this is the correct term) than the original.

As you can see from the tag on the photo below, it is supposed to be adjusted for saturation but it doesn't look like the original, or even the modified photoshop picture.

Thanks for your help,
Gary

[rjlittlefield]

Gary,

Sorry, I missed the fact that you're using Photoshop Elements. I casually assumed you had the full-blown Photoshop.

I think there are faster ways to proceed than to thrash postings in the forum. Check your PM's for another approach.

--Rik