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Friday Slide Show: New Growth
17 July 2026
When we revealed A Little Secret a few days ago, we thought we were done with the subject. After all, once you've revealed a secret, there isn't much more to say.
But the other day, the new growth started blooming. And we couldn't resist taking some macro shots of it.
Naturally, we were disposed to take the images in color.
But in the afternoon light, some of which was backlighting, the color seemed too harsh, too saturated, too extreme, when we looked at them on the screen.
Our first approach to the backlit images was to use Lightroom's masking to select the subject and lighten it, leaving the bright background untouched. But we still found the iPhone color a bit harsh.
We might have moderated that with one slider or another but we decided to convert them all to black and white. That restored the delicate tonalities we had appreciated without the cruder cosmetics of color.
Then we went overboard and tried a duotone using the Color Grading panel to set the shadows in a cool tone and the highlights in a warm tone.
And we added a vignette.
We didn't like that one as much (the cool tone was the wrong way to go, as you can see below) as the black and white images, though.
Sometimes you can get a little carried away.
But we were delighted to see a second growth beginning to bloom on The Orchid we had shot in January.
