BONEV PHOTOGRAPHY & DESIGN

An insect landed on my dirty car window while I was waiting on the parking lot for my daughter. I had my Leica Elmarit APO 100/2.8 lens on my Leica M 240 ready to shoot some portraits but the interesting thing about this phenomenal lens is that it is also a macro lens allowing to shoot 1:2 ration and with the phenomenal ELPRO adapter it becomes 1:1. This shot was done wide open and without the ELPRO adapter. It is not the best lens to use hand held for macro. I am pretty sure I used wide open aperture to be able to make any shot with the given light and that resulted in very shallow depth of field. When I was browsing the photos in Lightroom I said to myself- why not try Luminar's more precise controls to get some detail out of the photo. So I did and the results are absolutely amazing. With the masking tools I was able to produce 2 layers for sharpening different parts of the body using deferent detail tools, one layer for overall color and detail adjustment, and a last layer one for some real fast healing.

This is the original image. Quite flat and because of the window and the shallow depth of field it does not have much detail.

Layer one is for overall body of the insect. As you can see I used 4 filters to detail the body. You can notice how the legs starts to pop giving a little more detail over the whole body. Using the brush masking tool was a breeze to apply the effects to what I needed only.

Then layer 2 is for sharpening the head only. This makes it stand out more, as this is the only in focused part.

Layer 3 is the one with the most effects applied to it. Using all sort of color adjustments plus vignetting and structure. Structure is especially important here to bring some of the detail from my dirty car window back to make the photo more layered thus giving it a little more depth and detail. Color adjustments were also very important to make the image more vibrant but pleasant to the eyes.