So today surprisingly it was a nice and sunny day, hence after finishing my work I was taking another stroll with my camera. There I came across this plant growing between the stones on a pathway. I took a few pictures, as I wasn’t entirely sure yet how I would frame it, also used my flash in one of the pictures to get an a little more evenly lit image, but eventually I decided against using it. The natural light gave me a better feeling.

When I shot the picture, I already knew that I was either going to color-key it or to make it entirely black and white. Fortunately I could color-key it properly and achieved the look I had in mind.
I then did some de-noising and a little more editing to the plant, such as sharpening. Of course I had to adjust the surroundings as well and did so by using a gradient map (once again with a layer mask).

A general tip for doing color key pictures: If you can, don’t begin from scratch. Put together a decent layer mask by using selection tools such as the color range selection and then refine it by hand. This gives you a pretty good start and you don’t have to draw every single line by hand. With objects that have less structure, you might also use tools such as the lasso tool and then use “refine edge” to get a proper selection which you can then turn into a layer mask again (simply create a layer mask when you have your desired selection – the selection will then be applied into a mask).

I hope you enjoy the picture!