An image processing sequenceand some moss... |
| The scan against dark background of a new tuft of the Stellaria media is so heavy-looking on the white page that I placed it at the bottom. You'll want to start there, I think. Stellaria multimedia |
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| In the fifth and last step (above) I decided to go for even more muted colours - according to the canon of good taste that prefers the muted over the garish. I just lowered the saturation with 20% (and adjusted the drop shadow accordingly). perhaps this goes too far towards melting the sample into the background.
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| In the canons of Scandinavian Design there is a preference for a cool blonde colour scheme over a more dramatic one. So in line with this, I decided to work towards a slightly paler appearance. In the fourth step (above) I changed the opacity of the significant layer to 80% - and then dropped it onto a mask layer of the background white, to make it fully opaque again. Since I wanted to have a drop shadow (bluegrey and with a wide blur) as a softening wash behind the sample.
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| The extracted sample without additional processing looks too dark and heavy for my taste. I'm trying to make the processing simple - so in the third step (above) I just used the autolevels function of PhotoShop. The result is not bad - one might even want to stop there: contrast and saturation might be a bit exaggerated, on the other hand this may be a helpful enhancement. This is mostly a matter of taste.
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| In the next step (above) the Stellaria is extracted from the dark background - with as much care as possible, but intentionally leaving a bit of dark outline. This enhances the form - but as I have learned with the S-weeds, the one thing this is not all that good for is for showing off fine, pale hairs. In this sequence I have not paid particular attention to this problem (which is relevant to the Stellaria media
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| This is a 72 dpi version of the scan of a sample of Stellaria media on April 4th 2002 - the actual scan was made in 300 dpi, and I worked with that resolution through all the stages. I've edited out a lot of pale dust specks from the version here - nothing else. Oh yes, the edge of the pic is slightly softened. When I plan to extract an object from the background I always scan with a dark and distant background (a simple home made blackbox). Covering a plant with black paper and closing the scanner lid would crush the plant and reduce the 3D-effect that may otherwise be had - and the scan would show the texture of the paper rather than uniform darkness. It's a lot easier and cheaper to get uniform darkness than it would be to get uniform light. On a cover with a pale color the scanning procedure leaves stripes of shadow. |