burnt embers

Flower macros, two days in a row! This is a small hybrid geranium that is in my garden, called Johnson’s Blue. It is a great plant for our area which can be quite dry in the summer, and our style of hands-off gardening which means intermittent drought, bouts of weeds and nearly chronic neglect. A good friend divided some of this geranium from her garden when we first moved here and established a bed in the front – more than 15 years ago. It has been a successful inhabitant ever since. You can read more about it here (the first source I found, there are probably many others, and possibly better ones).

I recently purchased a copy of Topaz Details 3, and these images are the first that I have given a serious try with the software. Therefore, I have included a gallery at the end which shows also the Lightroom version of each image – most of these include a small amount of sharpening, a bit of clarity adjustment, a small (or sometimes large) amount of cropping and nothing else.

The difference that the Details 3 makes to these images is very obvious, but not over the top. I can see I will be using it quite a bit in the future. It seems to be especially good for (hand-held?) macro shots from the little I have seen. These are all processed through the ‘stylised detail collection’ using either using either ‘HDR Enhancement’ I (mostly) or II. I should have run some of them through LR4 again, to remove dust spots that were accentuated. But there they are; my sensor is pretty close to needing to go in for a cleaning I think. Yesterday’s shots would probably benefit from this treatment too.

.

.

.

.

.

To open gallery click on any thumbnail below, navigate with arrows and escape to return to this page.

Canon 5dii, Canon 100mm/f2.8 macro lens, ISO400, hand-held, exposure info in the gallery EXIF section.

.

.