Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Pretty picture: Papaver rhoeas


This is terribly out of date, of course. The photo is dated May 25. I had a last-minute change of heart about the post I'd originally planned for last Monday, and changing one thing meant changing other things, so I'm sort of scrambling for subject matter at the last minute, even though I actually have way more stuff going on here in the house than I can blog about already. It's complicated, and would be difficult to explain. Therefore, Papaver in January. Not that I expect many people will complain.


3 comments:

Paul said...

I'm more a somniferum sorta guy, but it's still gorgeous. Is that chamomile in the background? I love that stuff, too.

Kenneth Moore said...

I always have problems with that shade of red when I'm touching up photos. I don't know whether you do or not, but 'tis true for me--it tends to "bleed" (heh), making it hard to tell the difference between distinct objects (such as individual petals). Maybe it's the software I use--I got a new computer a few months ago and haven't redownloaded an illegal copy of Adobe Creative Suites yet, so I'm making do with some other (mostly free-ish) software.

I like the small variegation on the edge of a few of the petals. Like a dab of icing on a red velvet cupcake. Yum!

mr_subjunctive said...

Paul:

I don't know what's in the background, actually. Your guess is probably better than mine. This was just a picture from someone's garden in town, that I got while walking Sheba.

Kenneth Moore:

No, I have that problem pretty regularly too. (Also oranges and hot pinks -- Pelargonium flower pictures basically never work for me.) I don't remember if it was a problem with this particular photo or not, but at least in some cases, lowering the saturation slightly will keep the color intact while improving the amount of visible detail. Depending on the background, tweaking the levels of specific non-red colors can help too (adding blue if the background leans toward being overly yellow; adding green if the background is overly purple). But of course some pictures just can't really be helped no matter what you do to them. If you haven't tried IrfanView yet (it's free), I do heartily recommend it: it's fairly simple, and sometimes I suspect I'm spending a lot of time on something that Photoshop would be able to do faster, but although I bought a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 a long time ago, I've never been able to do much with it: it's capable of doing so many things that I can't figure out how to get it to do the specific things I want it to do.