Playing with Midtones

My digital camera is a tiny, comparatively cheap point-and-shoot that's about four years old, now. I keep thinking I should buy a digital SLR, or even just something with a nicer lens, but... but... This one fits in my pocket! And I've familiarised the hell out of its controls.

One of my favourite things things about it is the macro settings, which I inevitably turn to whatever flora I come across. My least-favourite thing is that it tends to wash out the higher mid-tone areas, so I tend to do a bit of post-production on my favourite images to bring back that richness and depth in tone.

Anyway, of course the thing with photoshop is that it's fun to play around with with settings, and of course alter things more extremely than you would originally conceive of - often that comes up with the most striking cropping or chiaroscuro. In summary: so this one time, I was tweaking the levels on a macro flora shot, and discovered that dragging the midtones right down resulted in this incredibly striking, gorgeous, alien image. (The image in question is the one at the top of this post.)

So, of course now I try it out on just about every macro I take. Examples of my favourites after the jump.

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