About a year ago, while playing golf at The Bridges at Rancho Santa Fe, I noticed this lovely bough of bougainvillea. (I’ve checked this spelling about a dozen times ... this seems to be the consensus for the correct way to spell it although a couple of other ways are pretty prevalent). The beautiful color contrasted and stood out against the surrounding dark green vegetation.  I went back that evening when the light was better and spent some time capturing various angles using a couple of telephoto lens options.  I was hoping a shallow depth of field would allow me to bring out the texture and colors of the flowers against the green background.

I originally processed this file using Capture One.  Lately I have been going back through many of my old images, and on this one I felt I could do a better job with the conversion.  Here is the first attempt at this file, using Capture One for the RAW conversion, and then several layers of Photoshop to enhance the image.  In this version I actually masked out the flowers so I could darken the green tones.

While I liked how this original version turned out (it looks pretty bad on the web though), when printed the subtle colors of the flowers blocked up ... I just couldn’t hold the detail.  The greens were too strong, and there were places where the masking of the flowers was obvious.

The new version was done with Lightroom 2.1 - almost exclusively.  I was able to soften the greens by using the HSL panel and pulling just a little saturation out of the green colors.  Using local adjustment tools I was able to darken and lighten tones in the flowers, pulling the delicate specular reflections on the petals which added depth texture.  The difference in the printed versions is pretty substantial ... the new version is much more appealing.