One of the places we visited in San Francisco was the Conservatory of Flowers… if you ever go to San Francisco make sure you visit this place, especially if you like flowers.

Anyway for my Before and After for today, I chose a photo taken at Conservatory of Flowers… don’t ask me what flower it is … I don’t know 😀 😀

As you can see from my photograph on the right, that background was far too busy for my liking.. I wanted to concentrate on the beautiful flower itself and not the have the background distract you.

So for my first basic edits in Lightroom, I did my usual, ‘Open up the shadows, take down the highlights, find my black and white point and added some clarity’.

I then sent the photo to Photoshop where I created a black background and cropped the image to a more pleasing aspect and filled.  My crop left me with some white background so again I filled this with black.  I then played around with the Levels and then sent my Image back into Lightroom. I also decided to flip the image in Photoshop.

Once I was back in Lightroom,  I played around with the Saturation in the Colour Panel, mainly the red and yellow colours and then added a few Radial Filters and a small Vignette.

 

I then decided to see what the photograph was like in Monochrome.

 

I like both images but I wanted to go further.. so I cropped the image to only show the centre part of the flower… firstly in colour.

 

And then in black and white

 

 

So from one image I got four different images…