Spring flowers are slowly appearing on the California coast. On the beach near Monterey recently I found purple sand verbana. (There is also a yellow variety.) The purple variety it quite striking close up, but the flowers are so small it can be missed. Each flower in the cluster is about a quarter inch (6 mm) across. As the season progresses the flower becomes common in the sand along the coast.

The first challenge is to get close enough for a decent-sized image of the flower. I didn’t want to get too close for fear of losing sharpness in the restricted depth of focus. Here is the original image:

The straight photo shows the foliage, the red stems, and the sandy habitat, so I consider it a good record of the variety. I succumbed to the temptation to make a punched up version of the image. Light-colored flowers show more color by darkening the highlights in Photoshop™ with Enhance > Adjust Lighting > Highlights/Shadows … then moving the lighten shadows slider to 0 and moving the darken highlights slider to the right. I also cropped the image to better feature the flowers.

Having paid good money for the Topaz Labs software filters for Photoshop I’m always looking for a victim to try them on. Through fiddling, um, make that systematic experimentation, a picked the Simplify 2 Watercolor effect. More systematic experimentation with the sliders controlling the effects produced:

A larger version is here

The watercolor filter suppress details in the sand that make the image too busy and that distract from the flowers. I noticed on my computer screen that the image loses contrast if it is viewed other than straight on. I haven’t noticed so striking a change with other photos.

An alternative to the watercolor effects filter is to use the standard Adjustments > Posterize filter with four or five levels, followed by the Palette knife filter.

So remember: look down, get close, punch up. At least in Spring, anyway.