Black Jezabel

[Alan]

Delias nigrina on my favourite Impatiens this morning - suffering from the cold



D7000 Tamron 16-300mm f/5.6 1/250 800 ISO hand held

[eaglem]

Very nice, love the vivid colours.

[Ozzie_Traveller]

G'day Alan

Beautiful matey - really beautiful ... lovely colours and details on the butterfly against such strong reds in the background [and always a hard colour to get 'right']
I'm sure you also are very pleased with the results - and so you deserve it too

Phil

[sejac]

Wow, those colors. The detail in the moth/butterfly are fairly impressive too.

[loose cannon]

Extraordinary!

[bill jolley]

First rate, top of the class,what more can one say

[LJG]

Lovely, what a pop of colour.

[Isac]

Colours and detail are stunning Alan, nice work. As Phil said, reds are not easy to get perfect. In fact its been driving me crazy to get reds exposed correctly. The red channel always seems to get clipped. I have been working in PS to fix it and come up with the idea of splitting the channels to find the darkest (usually the green or blue) and overlaying it on the original and using Luminosity or Hard Light blending modes to get the best result. I have written a Photoshop action if you are interested. If you want to take a look, let me know and I'll put it on my website for easy download.
This is the detail I could get with your image of the butterfly without changing things to much.

[Alan]

Thanks everyone. Reds also fill me with a bit of trepidation. Someone in another Forum came up with a method of controlling them, but I can't remember what it was I now just play around in RAW processing and hope for the best. Greg, I'm sure there is a tute on YouTube on how to do it.

The top of the flower still looks a bit blown to me.

[Alan]

Thanks Greg - certainly more detail there but looks a bit unnatural? Maybe somewhere in between? The flowers really are vivid orange/red as in my photo

Cheers

[Isac]

Cheers Alan, The action leaves the an adjustment layer to increase or reduce the effect so maybe a bit less opacity would have been better. I was actually quite chuffed that I could extract a bit of detail out of a small JPG file but that's just me I guess. It doesn't mean everyone will like it.

[seaslug]

Don’t know why you worry about it, it’s a wonderful shot of a beautiful creature.

[Isac]

Sorry about the comments and fix Greg, I won't worry about this sort of stuff any more.

[seaslug]

My apologies Isac, my comment was certainly not meant to be critical of your work or offensive. I’m just wondering how the ‘focus’ has shifted from the subject to the background. I like both versions because to me there’s nothing wrong with either of them.

[Isac]

All OK Greg, I get a bit excited when I see a challenge in front of me. I will try hard to curb my excitement from now on.