Since we left Augusta we have travelled East into the heart of Western Australia‘s forests. It’s hard to believe we will soon be crossing the Nullarbor which is named after its lack of trees. The native trees here are all types of eucalyptus but you would not know it looking at them as they vary from tall white barked trees to ones which resemble oak. This shot was taken as we cooked our diner on the free Barbecue in the National Park surrounding The Gloucester Tree which is a 61m tall tree which was regularly climbed to look out for fires. A job which is now done with light aircraft.

This image was accepted for Stock Photography at Shutterstock and is available for high resolution download here.

This Yellow Rose was taken at the end of the Garden in Grantham, UK. I used sRGB colour space instead of my normal Adobe RGB. Colour space determines the actual colour a specific RGB value corresponds to. Adobe RGB has a wider range of colour but this does mean each colour is further apart. For 8bit files you can visibly see a change when you shift a value by just 1. This is not great if you want smooth gradients but it does give richer Cyans and Greens. The narrower sRGB colour range is the standard for web output as it approximates the colour range of most common computer displays but for how long. The last display I bought boasted 100% Adobe RGB which means it will not be long before most can show these extra colours. For now I’m going to do some test posts in sRGB as no matter how good your monitor is you are limited by how your browser decides to display the colours.

N.B. After testing Firefox reproduces colours far more faithfully than I.E.

This is Belton Park in Lincolnshire, UK. It was the first chance to test out my new Canon 5D Mark II. It’s nice to be using a camera without a schizophrenic auto focus for a change.  The Mark II has been out for three years now and many believe a mark III will be announced soon. The good news is Canon have dropped the price of the Mark II recently which means you can get a lot of camera for your money.

To process this image I used the HSL/Grayscale tab in Camera RAW. This lets you change the saturation of individual colours. For this image the purple of the background flowers could be increased without over saturating the yellows in the grass.

This is Elvaston Castle in Derbyshire, UK. The original image was a little underexposed in the shadow areas. I used Fill Light in Camera RAW to bring back some detail. Lens Correction was also used to straighten the walls.

This is Braunston in Rutland, UK. It is a beautiful old English village. To make it look a little older I removed all the pylons, wires, concrete and tarmac. To add some colour to the sky I used the color range tool to select the bright areas of the sky. This selection was used to create a mask which was applied to a gradient. The Blend mode Multiply was used as this is the most forgiving when it comes to masks of light colours over dark colours. A rough mask set to Multiply will not cover the branches or leave a halo. The worst that can happen is the thinnest branches get a slight hint of blue. Even this could be argued as a natural effect of soft focus so the end result looks natural.

This simple use of spot colour is achieved by painting black on the layer mask of a Black & White layer. The Hue/Saturation layer above was used to make the ladybird nice and red. It was a little orange in the original capture. Vignette was achieved using a gradient layer and lens correction.

This Purple Aubretia was shot at londonthorpe just over one month ago. I used Camera RAW to process the image.

The first Blue Bells have started. This shot was taken 3 days ago in Barnsdale Wood Rultand, England, UK.

The first signs of spring at the end of our garden in the UK. I’m not sure what this is a bud of but it could be this Hawthorn Bush I shot last summer. I used a macro lens to shot this small subject. Macro lenses don’t magnify much but they do allow you to focus at a very short distance so you can get close to your subject. This image barely needed any Photoshopping so there is no before and after to show you this time.

This is the Hawthorn Blossom at the end of our garden in the UK. I tried to get the focal plane through the Stamen but is in front of the petals. To emphasize the anther at the tips I needed to increase the mid range contrast. This can be done with the clarity slider in Camera RAW or In Photoshop by using a high pass layer set to overlay blend mode. I never realized these two methods use the same technique until I read about it in this book. Thanks to Fliss and Alex for the birthday present. In this example I imported the image as a smart object. This means you can edit the RAW camera data in Photoshop and you reduce the chance of degrading the image. In this example I used a smart filter also which allows you to go back and change settings after they have been applied.