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Summer Rose
29 July 2019
On Sunday we continued making our acquaintance with the M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100mm f4.0 IS Pro. Which means we didn't wander too far from a comfortable chair. It was our day off, after all.
One of the things we particularly like about this zoom is that you can get quite close to your subject. That isn't generally true of vacation lenses, as smartypants lens reviewers like to call this versatile class of optics.
You can, in fact, get as close as 5.91 inches to your subject. We shot this at f4, 1/500 second and ISO 200 with the lens zoomed all the way to 100mm at a distance of 2.18 feet.
We don't have too many flowers in the vicinity of our patio chairs but a little rose bush is one of them. It's a survivor, having come back to life after being uprooted from a pot and tossed onto a weed pile and, later, stomped on by a two-year-old escaping a rabid uncle. Nothing seems to faze it.
But it's a red rose and red is the bane of digital sensors. They just can't quite get it right. (Is that still true? -- Editor)
There's a cure, though, as we explained in our 2018 Memorial Day piece. For that occasion, we salvaged the red petals of a poppy.
After running the DNG file through Piccure+, we used the same trick to restore the glory we saw in this red rose, which is why we're showing you a rollover above. It shows both what we ended up with and what we started with.
The red rose isn't the only thing we changed.
We weren't very charmed by the brown dirt background. So we created a Color Fill layer of the background alone, changed the hue to a green and set the blending mode to Hue to preserve the luminosity. Only the color changed.
Then we gave the background image (the photograph) a dark vignette to focus on the flower.
The whole experience made going back to work today a much more pleasant experience.
