affinity photo Advice For this Macro photo.

[Gabzaba]

Hi guys

I'm an amateur photographer from Italy. I'm 21 years old and I'm beggining my journey with Affinity Photo. 
I would like to have some impartial Advice about this photo I shot few days ago. I post produced this raising the contrast and using my brush to give a little bit of clarity. I raised the shadows and I used the brush to be more precise raising them only in particular parts of the image.
At the end I used a Green Fill Layer (with 4% opacity and soft light fusion mode ) to highlight and "give more importance" to the green part of the image. 
I shot this photo with a Nikon D3100 with a 55mm Micro-Nikkor f/2.8. 
 f 2.8 / ISO 400/ 1/200 

Bee's head was a little bit out of focus  (I Even raised the Details, Radius 5% and Amount 100%)

 

[firstdefence]

I would add a bit of vignette, Ideally the image would have been better taken in portrait to capture more of the flower and you would have been able to crop in a bit tighter, it might be better to have a gradient layer from a darker green to the original green you have used to give more focus to the bee and the flower.

[unni]

Good shot with details but composition could have had the full flower included.

Shooting at f8 will give more depth of field. It has to be compensated by reducing speed and therefore use of manual external flash with a soft diffuser.

Flash will have to be held with hand quite close to subject (about 6 inches to 12 inches approx). Flash will eliminate hand held related and subject motion blur completely.

The color noise in the background can be removed by layer based editing of a duplicate layer. Then use a black mask and brush in the noise removed section by painting

with a white brush on the mask. Similarly sharpen one layer and brush-in by painting on its mask only those portions where sharpened details are required. In the image, I would

brush-in only in-focus portion of the bee and junction between the flower and the base. That brown straw can be cloned away fully or atleast the easier part of it.

 

[craigget]

I agree with unni.  At least F8.  With todays cameras you can also raise the ISO.  If you use a flash try under exposing it by at least one stop.  That will bring out the color and detail and the flash won't overwhelm the picture.  Also tripod is a big help for Macro Photography. Hope that helps and be proud, your picture is great.

[jetstorm]

I only have knowledge and experience of Macro Photo with Nikon F(so, long-long-time-ago-story), and used 58mm(very first model of 58mm) with Macro Kit. If I were you, I use f1.2 -- f1.8, ISO 60 -- 100, slower than 1/100, maybe 1/60 (film, not digi), etc....

New 58mm is very good lense, very clear. I use this lens with Nikon Digi Cameras.

(Photo Below ; My Nikon F and 58mm -- very first model)

BTW, did you try this tool ? It is not hepful infomation for your photo, but, amazing tool. (Zoom --> Resize --> Zoom --> Resize... do not forget to reduce pic size after used this tool)

Topaz A.I.Gigapixel 1.0.2
https://topazlabs.com/ai-gigapixel/

[Gabzaba]

Thank you so much, guys :) A lot of useful comments. 

[John Rostron]

On 9/8/2018 at 4:54 AM, jetstorm said:

BTW, did you try this tool ? It is not hepful infomation for your photo, but, amazing tool. (Zoom --> Resize --> Zoom --> Resize... do not forget to reduce pic size after used this tool)

Why should you want to reduce the size of the image after enlarging it with GigaPixel?

John

[jetstorm]

If you don’t reduce it, you’ll do your work on very very big pic, it means, big image size and, of course, very big file size.

If you have very cutting-edge graphic environment and huge memory, you don’t need to care, may be. But, this software actually requires quite strong GPU environment, as you know, maybe... If you don’t have good GPUs, this software works very very heavily, and sometimes(or often) freezes.

(Generally, GPU-based softwares are less stable than CPU-based. And, computer hardwares are basically optimezed for CPU.)

 

It’s my very personal opinion. Try it by yourself !

(Imagine... when you use Photoshop, for ex., and duplicate based layer again and again, its file size becomes bigger. 300x300 pxls pic is smaller than 1000x1000 pxls pic..., etc...)

[John Rostron]

I have been trying GigaPixel. The updated version now works (albeit very slowly) on my antiquated graphics card. So far, I cannot see it being worth the money. I do use BenVista's PhotoZoom which is much cheaper.

Rearding file size reduction, do you actually mean resizing the image by scaling (which undoes all the upsizing), or by cropping to smaller pixel size? I can see the advantage of the latter, but not the former.

John

[jetstorm]

It depends on what you want, and when you want to use this software in your workflow, I think.

Cropping is a good way, I agree.

[John Rostron]

I did some trials of GigaPixel here.

John

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, John Rostron said:

So far, I cannot see it being worth the money. I do use BenVista's PhotoZoom which is much cheaper.

The current version of PhotoZoom is quite expensive at list price, but I got a copy of version 6 at a greatly reduced price (through a special offer from Serif) and it works very well.

[John Rostron]

4 hours ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

The current version of PhotoZoom is quite expensive at list price, but I got a copy of version 6 at a greatly reduced price (through a special offer from Serif) and it works very well.

Yes, that's what I did.

John