Mazon Creek Flora - Crenulopteris acadica

[connorp]

I was inspired by @Mark Kmiecik and his quality photographs to finally learn some basic image editing. I had this beautiful Crenulopteris acadica fern open yesterday and figured it would be a good specimen to make a first attempt. Let me know your thoughts.

 

[Yoda]

Lovely specimen 

[Mark Kmiecik]

Nicely done! Are you using Paint 3D? You can use Microsoft Office Picture Manager to brighten the mid-tones and increase contrast slightly. I like that you put in additional info. Makes me want to do that, but I have 650-ish specimens and I maintain a database in Microsoft Excel so I would only be increasing my work load. That's a beautiful specimen, worthy of your effort! What did you use to take the photo? Are you filling the background by hand or auto-fill? Is this specimen from the creek?

Edited December 7, 2021 by Mark Kmiecik

[connorp]

28 minutes ago, Mark Kmiecik said:

Nicely done! Are you using Paint 3D? You can use Microsoft Office Picture Manager to brighten the mid-tones and increase contrast slightly. I like that you put in additional info. Makes me want to do that, but I have 650-ish specimens and I maintain a database in Microsoft Excel so I would only be increasing my work load. That's a beautiful specimen, worthy of your effort! What did you use to take the photo? Are you filling the background by hand or auto-fill? Is this specimen from the creek?

Thanks! The photo was just taken using my iPhone. It does not take good up close pictures, but this specimen was large enough for it to take a decent picture. I'm hoping to get an actual camera for Christmas. As for the editing I used GIMP, which is basically a free and open-source Photoshop. The most time consuming part by far was removing the background. The fuzzy select tool (magic wand in Photoshop) was able to remove probably 95% of the background off the bat, but I then spent a while manually cleaning up the areas it missed. Adding the info afterwards was pretty straightforward. From start to finish, maybe an hour, but I'm sure I'll get faster with practice.

 

And yes this was from the creek. I kept the contrast low to not wash out the pyrite dusting - I really love the black concretions when they are speckled with pyrite.

[Mark Kmiecik]

12 minutes ago, connorp said:

Thanks! The photo was just taken using my iPhone. It does not take good up close pictures, but this specimen was large enough for it to take a decent picture. I'm hoping to get an actual camera for Christmas. As for the editing I used GIMP, which is basically a free and open-source Photoshop. The most time consuming part by far was removing the background. The fuzzy select tool (magic wand in Photoshop) was able to remove probably 95% of the background off the bat, but I then spent a while manually cleaning up the areas it missed. Adding the info afterwards was pretty straightforward. From start to finish, maybe an hour, but I'm sure I'll get faster with practice.

 

And yes this was from the creek. I kept the contrast low to not wash out the pyrite dusting - I really love the black concretions when they are speckled with pyrite.

If you have an iPhone 7 or newer you should be able to get much better detail. Did you use a tripod? If not and you don't have one you can get one on online for less than 20. Makes a world of difference over handheld, and a bluetooth shutter release is about 5. Once you get it focused well and remove any vibration or movement you get really good detail. But I'm warning you now, once you start taking good photos it's an addiction you can't let go of. I bought an app called ProCamera for my iPhone 7 a few days ago and I'm liking what I see so far just goofing around and getting used to it.

Edited December 7, 2021 by Mark Kmiecik

[deutscheben]

Ooh, that’s a lovely one!