Flowers on Ebony and Ivory

I’ve been photographing flowers for transparency the last few days, and processing them to appear on black and white backgrounds. The trick here is lighting, photography, and Photoshop: so three disciplines combine.

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In terms of lighting, you want a high key setup with strong backlighting. The exposure histogram should be biased to the right, implying nominal overexposure.

To put the flower on a black background, I convert to LAB color, and invert the L channel. I then adjust the colors and channels to create a pleasing effect.

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For the Fourth of July Rose below I used the lighting setup described in One-Off. This was an HDR image in the sense that I shot a number of different exposures, with the darkest more or less what the light meter liked. I started with the lightest exposure, and used layer masking to build up the final image.