Sunflower

I was going to treat you to my Gladioli tonight but ended up messing about with this pic of a sunflower I took at the same time.

For those of you who might be interested - it was shot with a single studio light to the left, reflector brolly attached. the light was further diffused by one of those large round fold up diffusers between the light and flower (those things are a swine to pack away but I've more or less got the hang of it now).

Once I got the image on here I duplicated the layer and gave it a fairly heavy dose of Lucisart Whyeth to pull some detail from the apparently black centre. All the rest was erased and layers flattened. Then I duplicated the layer again and once more applied the Whyeth for the leaves and erased everything else.

Then a bit of a touch up at the bottom of the stems where there were excess leaves and I filled the background in with solid black as the whyeth does tend to speckle the plain backgrounds a bit.

And here you go - one Sunflower.