Hi. folks. This is my first post as I am doing the free trial for PhotoLab 8. I was surprised at how well this photo came out. the Beemachine web app was able to identify the bee as a Red-Tailed Bumblebee and with this quality I can just see the red tail of this, possibly old, male. As this is my first time at posting an image if it doesn’t look too good perhaps somebody will give me some advice.
I am almost certain to buy the software given my problem with Adobe Bridge.
Thanks
Mike
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Very nice! Just curious: did you have a macro light or some other artificial light illuminating the purple flowers?
Just sun with Em1 MkIII and 60mm macro. A tremendous lens for my attempt to identify all the bees in the garden.
Silly question: what was your shooting distance? I might have a go at getting the bees in my Italian garden now the roses are beginning to bloom.
Can’t say for sure but the full size picture shows most of the flower spike which has been cropped out. I take a record shot as soon as I can and then when using the macro lens try to get closer before it flies off. If I’m lucky I can get to less than a meter but it’s hard to get very close. Hover Flies are so much easier to get close to. I use spot metering and single point focusing to try to be accurate.
What setting did you use?
From my perspective the picture is good enough. Light was very soft, background is not busy. For this type of photo I usually try to make the main subject stand out just a bit more and “tame” the background (which is already quite good in this case). You may try the following:
- Set HSL Vibrancy to about +5–+15 and perhaps blacks to -5 so that the flowers and bee “importance” match (my favorite change in this case, if any).
- Set ClearVision to 5-15 (might make background busy, so counteract by diminishing Microcontrast, which in turn might lower the sharpness perception). “Careful with that axe Eugene” (Pink Floyd) – it may bring some halos in general, but not at this setting.
- You may experiment with HSL by probing the flower and lowering Luminance by 5 or 10 in the blue channel, as set by the probe.
- If you have FP license, maybe try to go up with fine-contrast in highlights and blacks, while lowering it in midtones. It might require increasing Lens Softness Optimization (LSO), if you’ve decreased it. The goal would be to make background more calm and main topics stand out just a little bit more.
Just very delicate tuning, anything too much would hurt it badly, imho.
The default LSO may be too much for general public, but if you go down with Microcontrast, it may be OK (maybe a general rule for dealing with background?). Just my 5 cents.
I am still in the early stages of using Photolab but after reading several comments about doing Denise before any AI changes I thought I’d set up my own default preset which only does the optics related stuff. When making light and detail changes I use the Loupe tool to
see the final outcome as the denoising is not done initially as they say it is too processor intensive but does show in the loupe window.
My aim in 2023 was to take photos to try and identify all the bees seen in my garden, so the bee is the most important part of the picture.
This is the original Raw file as processed by Mac Preview and exported to a lower quality JPG for file size reasons.
I am also including the .dop file to show my other changes. It also shows my lack of experience as I had already made some changes which I didn’t totally want before I created a Version to produce the final cropped image.
E8030185.ORF.dop (25.4 KB)