I wanted to create a soft looking flower… and to see how soft and delicate I could make a harsh looking photo by using Lightroom and Photoshop.

As you can see from the SOOC photo on the right, that particular rose has many petals and I did manage to get most of the rose in focus… as I was using shallow depth of field settings on my camera.

So I started off in Lightroom, and my first task was to crop the photograph until I got the amount of petals I wanted to play around with.  So in the Basic Panel my first job was to lower the saturation, contrast and increase the exposure.  After that I played around with the Highlights and Shadows sliders and then I then readjusted the Vibrance and Saturation to achieve a pastel pink rose. I then added some minimal split toning before exporting my photo to Photoshop.

Once I was in Photoshop, I duplicated my layer and then using the Lumenzia Panel by Greg Benz I added some sharpening and used a setting of 3.5.  I only wanted to sharpen the certain parts of the flower, mainly the centre of the bloom, so I added a Layer Mask filled it with black and then added an eclipse shape with a lot of feather so that the mask only allowed the section I selected to be sharpened.

I then added a Colour Fill Layer and choose one of the pastel pinks and set the blending mode to colour.  As I only wanted the same section enhanced as per my previous layer I just used the same layer mask as my sharpening layer.  Using Shift+Alt+Control+E I created a new layer which merged all my other layers together… to this layer I added a Gaussian Blur.  But as I only wanted the blur to affect the outer edges of my photography, I copied my layer mask and then inverted the mask.

After that I then added a Black and White Adjustment Layer and use the same Layer Mask as my Gaussian Blur and I then lowered the Opacity of the layer to around 40%.

I was happy with the Image so I then saved the image and it automatically transferred it back to Lightroom.

Theoretically speaking I could have achieved the exact same adjustments in Lightroom without going to Photoshop but I used Photoshop a) because I have it and pay for it and b) because it gives you experience of playing around with layer masks, adjustment layers etc.  Plus you learn how to do things quicker once you have practised a few times 😀 😀

Now that my image was back in Lightroom, I did want to do much more to it so the only edits I did was in the Details Panel where I added a little bit of sharpening using the Edge Masking and a little bit of noise reduction.  In the Effects Panel, I added a Vignette but instead of darkening the edges I lightened them just a little.  And here is the photo in a black frame.

And in the frame below which I created in Photoshop I used the colours of the image for the mount.