I love orchids, I can’t grow them mind you but I think they are one of natures most elegant flowers.  Olbrich Gardens in Madison, WI has a great orchid collection and I go there often to see what’s in bloom.  I photographed this grouping  a few years ago but unfortunately a bright sun and distracting background resulted in a less than optimal original image (upper left panel)

I have recently been experimenting with High Dynamic Range images where multiple exposures are combined to compensate for scenes with extremes of contrast and I had the idea to combine this capability with the spot light tool in Photoshop.  The idea being to create individual images with a directed spot on each flower (middle panels in the image) and then combine them into a single photo that would have each flower perfectly exposed (lower right panel).  The steps for how I did this are outlined below.

Step 1.  Make a background copy and crop the image to the square format.  Cropping had two effects 1) it minimized the amount of background I had to work with and 2)  it optimized the composition.

Step2.  Remove the distracting background.  Use the quick select tool to highlight just the background and save the selection.  With the background selected I used the brightness and contrast tool to turn the background to black.  This is was my preference but you don’t have to all the way to black.

Step 3. With the background darkened use the spotlight tool to highlight each individual flower with a subtle white light spot and save each image as a separate file.  I found through trial and error that underexposing each flower and limiting the bleed of light onto the other flowers was necessary because when the images were combined the total exposure of all the images resulted in an over exposed photo.

Step 4. Use the Merge to HDR Pro function in Photoshop to combine the images.

Step 5. Make final contrast and color adjustments using the levels and color saturation tools.  I like oversaturated color so the magenta’s and yellow in the middle of each flower were purposely punched up!

A 16 X 16 of this photo printed on archive quality matte paper hangs in the living room of my home.  Use my contact page if you have questions about how this was done.  See Group of Orchids under Living Things in the galley for a larger more detailed view of the final photo.