When shooting flowers with your digital camera, there are 4 ideal times:

1) In the morning or late afternoon, if you are shooting on sunny days. I always use a telephoto lens (300mm) and try to make sure the light behind the flowers.

2) Just after it rains. Shooting flowers and the rain drops right after it rains can give you some amazing photos. Always ensure you use a tripod and if you have one, a macro lens.

3) Cloudy, overcast days. The best time to shoot flowers is on cloudy days when the sun is hidden by the clouds and you do not have the harsh direct light hitting the flowers.

4) In the mornings. Again when the light is not too direct and harsh and they could be light dew, flower photos would come out great.

If you are using Photoshop to treat the photos you taken then perhaps your natural tendency would be to say “do I really need filters?”.

You can do a lot in Photoshop but a filter will help you capture what you see with your eyes more accurately and even enhance the scene if you so desire.

Using filters gives you much more control on how you capture various elements of your photo. For example, you can boost the colours of the sky and the greenery with out actually affecting other parts of the scene or you can darken the sky while keeping the foreground in the right exposure.

Various Kinds of Filters

Even though there are several different kinds of filters here are a few that I think will suit most amateur photographer’s needs.

Polarising Filter

You can use the polarising filter to boost the colour saturation in your images and darken blue skies. You can also get rid of reflections or glare on bright sunny days.

Neutral Density Grad Filter

An ND Grad filter is most useful when you want to balance the exposure of a scene. If one area is dark while the other bright, an ND Grad filter can help you even it out.

Coloured Grad Filter

If you want to add a particular colour cast to an part of an image or scene, this filter will come in quite handy.

Warm-Up Filter

If you want tone up the colours of a scene to be warm then you can use this filter.

Diffuser

If you want to soften harsh light and add a soft focused diffusion to your photo then you can use the diffuser.

If you have taken a shot includes an exapanse of boring sky then it really is simple to add some interest to the background by replacing the blank sky with an interesting one. For example take a look at the following shot before and after I have changed the sky. I then outline the steps to change the sky.

Step 1: Add a new sky image to the current photo that you are editing. You can find many photos of sky on Google or perhaps as I always say, better to take your own shots and keep them handy.

Step 2: Enlarge the new sky image so that it fits nicely on the photo you are editing and then align it’s horizon with the horizon of the photo. Then select the “Hard Light” option of the blend mode for the sky image by selcting the layer.

The resulting image will be like this: As you can see even though the sky image has blended into the photo beneath, it looks quite ragged and patchy.

Step 3: Next hide the new sky image and select the background layer.

Step 4: Click on the magic wand, set tolerance to 100 and then click on the blank sky.

Then Select > Modify > Expand to expand the magic wand selection. Set it to 5.

Then Select > Feather and set it to 5 also.

Step 5: Make the sky layer visible and ensure it is selected by clicking on that layer.

Step 6: Click on “Layered Vector Mask” icon at the bottom of the layers palette. You will now see a mask icon with black areas. The sky image now blends quite well with the background photo.

Step 7: To make it more realistic you can now add a little bit of foreground reflection of the clouds and also brighten up the over all image by boosting color saturation to make it look better.

Have you ever wondered how all professional photos that you see in magazines have such vivid colors? Granted, good equipment, the right conditions and the correct exposure are essential to great photo.

But even photos taken by amateurs can be boosted to look much better. The secret is a little bit of post production in Photoshop or Elements.

Step 1: Open the photo you would like to work on in Photoshop. Then create a duplicate layer by clicking on Layer > Duplicate Layer.

Step 2: Select the duplicate layer and apply a little bit of blur by selecting Filter > Blur > Glaussian Blur and set it to 3.

Step 3: Select the duplicate layer and set the blend mode to “Color”. This will ensure that the original background photo will show thourgh and any affect applied to the colors of the duplicate layer will be visible only. Then click on “Create new fill or Adjustment Layer” icon.

Step 4: For the new Adjustment Layer, select the “Hue abd Saturation” option.

Step 5: Set the “master” saturation to 55, green to 20 and blues to 20. Finally flaten the image and you are done!