Cosmos sulphureus and some guests

[beryllium10]

Very nice! I like #4 and #5; #5 especially for the contrast between orange and blue, a favourite colour pairing for me.  The orange colour of these flowers reminds me of the intense orange of California poppies (Eschscholzia californica (not a botanist, I had to look that up)).  I find those a challenge to photograph in strong sunlight.  Under auto-exposure the red channel will often clip by a full stop or more at the camera's preferred exposure, which flattens out a lot of detail in the bright orange petals.  To bring the red channel back within range, I have to under-expose the photo overall by a corresponding amount.  I guess this may be happening with the dark greens in #1-#3 and the deep blue of the sky in #6.  They remind me of the beautiful intense reds and yellows I used to be able to get by slightly underexposing ektachrome slide film.

Cheers,  John

[Akira]

John, thanks for sharing your insight and analysis.

Indeed putting the red channel under control was tricky.  And you are right about the underexposure of dark green and blue sky: the blue channel crushed to the left wall of the histogram.  I raised the shadow control to recover the blue channel to some extent, but I chose to stay with the tonal balance that I liked.  All images were shot at ISO 200, and the wide dynamic range of D750 seemed to have helped a bit to keep the color under control.

[Mongo]

Mongo, thanks!

After some discussion in another thread, I found that Adobe Standard color profile is applied in ACR regardless of the Picture Control settings in the camera.  So, I experimented with the Picture Control pulldown menu in ACR before I adjust exposure, contrast, etc.  I fouind that the Picture Control did amazing job and makes the post process very easy.

was not aware of this. Great info and very useful. Big thanks Akira. 

[Akira]

was not aware of this. Great info and very useful. Big thanks Akira.

You are welcome, Mongo.  I also remembered that my pro photog friend had said that the in-camera JPEG was hard to beat by processing RAW by oneself.  To me, it turned out to be quite true.