Shutter Mike Photography

I took this photograph of an aloe bloom in my backyard as part of the Faded and Blurred 365 Photo Project I am participating in.  As is sometimes the case, it did not turn out exactly as I had planned.  The lighting was off, which can easily be fixed in Photoshop, but it was not as sharp as I would have liked, which is harder to adjust after the fact.  Unfortunately I had run out of daylight and since the project calls for one photo a day I needed to get something done before the next day began.  So I decided to experiment with a few of the settings in Photoshop to see if I could compensate for my lack of focus.

I started with the RAW file in Photoshop CS4 and played with the settings in the camera RAW window until I got the image to a point where I liked the “enhanced” coloration.  For this image the clarity, vibrance and saturation were all increased in order to mask the lack of sharp focus and make the coloring the main subject of the image.