Coloratura Tulip

[Marty E]

Here’s my original with 2 edits. I’m envisioning my tulip as a coloratura soprano & trying to improve my post-processing with finessing atmosphere & mood. Any edit suggestions to sell her character? I’m also trying to work on storytelling & am scouting out pareidolia faces in unconventional tulips.

[Robert Apple]

Well Marty, you lost me with coloratura soprano. Now If I was to go into my experience with what sells. If you looking for “ART” sales go with Mono or very muted tones, Pretty much anything else High Vibrancy and Saturation, greeting cards, Restaurant wall decor, Calendars, ect . If you really want to make a study of it there is an old 1950’s book called “Color Psychology and Color Therapy By Faber Birren” which really dives into how color effects the human Psyche and can be very valuable in editing and sales , and especially in scene creation in how to provoke a certain mood.

[Marty E]

Great feedback, Robert! Thanks for your ideas. I’ll see if I can find that book at the library, I love color psychology. It would be nice to actually sell some of my photos. BTW, coloratura soprano pareidolia. Does that help?

[bucweeet]

I guess it depends on what software you have at your disposal when you are editing your images, Marty. You may find that some software offer a lot of different ways to enhance and/or finish an image.

Here are two examples for you (basic editing in LR5.7… PS6.0 and finished in Boris Fx Optics (although you should be able to get a similar result in PS):

In the above image I started by rotating your image about 30 degrees to the left (this levelled the ‘eyes’) and then increased contrast, darkened the background and added the equivalent of burned areas (eyes/mouth) as well as given it an overall desaturated look.

This second image has a more aggressive crop than the first one. Hopefully highlighting the eyes/mouth and ‘hair line’ more.

Although I haven’t done this… you would be able to add a couple of highlights in the eyes to sell it even more. (and maybe add highlights to emulate some abstract teeth as well).

I also tried some ‘liquify’ and ‘puppet warp’ to shape the eyes and mouth but my skill level with those is not very good so I didn’t like my end result with them and decided not to use them.

[Rob Wood (Admin)]

TIL about Boris FX OPtics.

[bucweeet]

I deleted this post as I don’t want to hi-jack Marty’s post.  I’ve re-posted this in general chat

[Anne Hornsby]

I had to look up pareidolia.   My new favorite word!  With that in mind, I prefer the monochrome version.  But I do think the curling leaf and vertical greenery shapes are really interesting and suggestive, too, so what would it look like to lighten those?

[Marty E]

Thanks for your suggestion, @annehornsby! I’ll give that a try 😊

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