The above photograph has been processed in both Lightroom and Photoshop…. and was taken at Quex Park Gardens, near Birchington in Kent on the Isle of Thanet.. back in July of 2015.
The gardens are spectacular and the wooded area is lovely to roam around. As you can see from the photograph on the right there was a lot of noise to it and it was bland and boring… I knew I had to add some light and clarity to the purple flowers.. So I played around in the Basic Panel of Lightroom with the Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Blacks, White, and Clarity.
After that I decided to crop the photo slightly… and added some sharpening and noise reduction again.. using the Edge Masking in the Details Panel.
After that I added a couple of Radial Filters one to the centre to brightened up the flowers and the second to slightly desaturate the edges of the photo. Once I was happy with that I then exported the photograph to Photoshop. Once I was in Photoshop I knew the first thing I had to do was create a luminosity mask… I did this using Greg Benz’s Free Luminosity Panel.
I found a mask that I thought appropriate in the Channels Panel and increased the contrast of the mask. I then applied two textures and used the luminosity mask on those textures.
I then changed both the Blending Modes of the textures to Overlay. My final edit was to add a colour fill layer and I for this I used the Multiply Blending Mode.
I then saved my image and it was automatically re-imported back into Lightroom. Once back into Lightroom I added a Graduated Filter to the whole photo and used a lilac colour and increased the exposure slightly.
That was it… image finished … and I do like the textures and how they do disguise the noise a little as the photograph was shot with a high ISO.
