The Purples: Part One
I’ve always thought that purple flowers were one of the hardest photos to process. Almost any deviation in post-processing results in odd-looking, supernatural, or ugly flowers. I’m sure there’s a technical explanation involving color gamuts and sensor capabilities, but in the end, I just want to be able to play with my photos of purple flowers (and blue, and violet, and lavender, and all the colors in between) the same way I play with all my other flower photos and not end up with some technicolor monstrosity.
So yesterday I hit on a pretty nice approach in Lightroom that I’d figure I’d share here.
Here’s a photo of some of my favorite weeds I took last week:
A small white balance change towards the blue end of the spectrum results in this:
A few quick edits to some of the Basic Tone settings gets us going further down the path I want to go. To wit, I pushed the exposure to almost a full extra stop (+.73), added some highlight recovery, and pushed the blacks just a tiny bit. I also kicked up the brightness to +57.
Playing with the tone curve by pushing the Highlights to +36, the Lights to +33, the Darks to +38, and taking the shadows all the way down to -100 gives us this:
I think that this is actually quite a lovely improvement to the original, and all done without touching global saturation or tweaking any of the individual colors. But let’s face it: this isn’t quite my style, so I am going to touch saturation and tweak all the individual colors.
First, I’m going to pull the Vibrance down to -7 and the global Saturation down to -15 – hardly rebellious moves, to be sure. It’s in the individual colors’ settings that I’ll really achieve the look I’m going for.
I desaturate almost all the colors to -100. The one exception is Blue. When we changed our white balance, we changed what colors the flowers were, and while they started out a healthy Purple, they’re now skewed toward the blue side. By changing the Blue Hue toward the purple end of the spectrum and keeping some saturation, we can get a very similar color for the flowers that we started with. And for extra pop, we can set the Blue Luminance to +100.
I made quite a few adjustments to the luminances of various colors as well. For instance, a lot of the background was made up of Greens and Aquas. I adjusted the Green Luminance to +62 and the Aqua Luminance to +79.
All those changes took our photo to this:
Quite a dramatic difference, eh? I actually like this ghostly silvery look, but by bumping up the saturations of the Blues and Purples, we can get that color of the flowers right back without introducing anything else to distract from the blooms:
A bit of split-toning highlights added (Hue: 60, Saturation: 15) and some minor vignetting (Amount: -48, Midpoint: -27), and we end up with what I think is quite a nice photo:
