Roses are....

in HDR!  (Look, stop shaking your heads and rolling your eyeballs at me, it's late ;)

Anyhoo, so I've been RAVING about my PSE9, here, here, and HERE.  :) Yep gonna do it again, lol!  Well, I took WAY too many pics of some roses that my daughter and I got for Valentine's Day, and this blog is  about a photograph of the ONE I got (along with a singing quartet :).  I was struggling with the uneven lighting and getting very frustrated.  Back lit petals are gorgeous but not when they are coupled with darkly lit centers, wah!

I decided to play with the AEB feature on my camera (somebody's gonna correct me here, I can just feel it).  I don't remember what it stands for but it's pretty cool.  You set the camera up for the exposure you want as a midline image, set the AEB and it will take  a total of 3 images at one time with 3 different exposure settings.  One is the image you set the camera to initially take, one is darker, and one is lighter.

I knew that I could do HDR (high dynamic range) shots (combining several shots with different exposures to bring out the best "part" of each image) with my PSE9.  So, I set my camera up on the tripod and messed around a little.  I processed my images from RAW, not adjusting any lighting for any of the original photos.  Went on Youtube for a little tutorial and had some fun.

Here are the original images....

 

Now, along with the HDR process, I used the cloning tool to get rid of the yellowish background at the top and the

CONTENT AWARE feature that is THE BOMB to get rid of the stem :D

If I haven't said it yet.......

I LOVE THIS PROGRAM!!!