Dramatic midsummer blues

Johnson’s blue cranesbill geraniums are going strong as midsummer approaches. On the rainier side of the mountains in the Pacific Northwest our summers tend to start a little later than most. We can’t reliably plan an outdoor event in advance until after Independence Day.While June is a great time for roses some of the other flowers are going strong right now as well and the crane’s bill geraniums are a personal favorite. This trio peaking out of the shade caught my eye while walking the dogs a couple of days ago.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day and Mama Cormier’s Thursday Trios.

Chiaroscuro style image

I’ve been experimenting with the technique this month, using flowers and the somewhat harsh natural light of June. First taking a photo where the highlights show against shadows. Then using post processing to increase the dramatic difference: Chiaroscuro means light/shadow.

Chiaroscuro is a method from painting, popular during the Renaissance. Here is an example:

Chiaroscuro features are deep shadows and strong highlights from a directional light source,with lots of detail in the highlights.

To get the effect I underexpose the photo a bit, enough to ensure that no details are lost in the highlights.

The next step is to use Raw Therapee. The tools I’ve found helpful, in no particular order, are:

In the Exposure tab: highlight compression in the Exposure tools. This brings out detail in the bright areas. Also, I use the tone curves.

In the Details tab: the Haze Removal tool brings out details and darkens the shadows. Also, for some photos, the Contrast by details tool is useful. Note: I always apply both the Local contrast and Noise Reduction for color noise. My post Create a Raw Therapee Processing Profile describes the tools I apply to all photos.

I finish up in the GIMP, where I make a duplicate layer and the multiply blend mode, modifying the opacity and masking the layer to get a more dramatic contrast between the light and dark layers. Then I make a layer from the visible (some people might use a merge function in lieu of this) use the curves tool to finish up. Colors>Curves.

If you are unfamiliar with using the open-source software Raw Therapee and the GIMP, you can learn about using them in this post: Photo processing workflow using open source software.