Many of us are constantly battling with dandelions, trying to keep them out of our lawns. They are weeds and we don't like seeing their seeds flying across the lawn attached to little parachutes ready to drop down anywhere on the grass and start things afresh. Nevertheless when examined closely I find them to be things of beauty. And oh so intricate.

With this one, I went for maximum sharpness.  I set the aperture wide open at F2.8 to get a blurred background, and focus bracketed 10 raw images.  I combined the images in Photoshop which automatically aligned and stacked the 10 images into 1 tiff file.

All the images as well as the tiff file (see the "before" image at the bottom of this post) were washed out giving what appeared to be a nearly sold yellow flower with no depth nor any nooks and crannies. The histogram showed that the yellow channel was nearly blown out.

After stacking in Photoshop, and with a little work in Lightroom, I was able to bring out details. The sliders that received major use were those of contrast, texture, and dehaze. Not so obvious was the use of vignetting to darken the areas around the blossom. I used the radial tool for that.

After stacking and processing

"Perfect Dandelion"
May 17, 2020
Panasonic GX80/85
Olympus 60mm F2.8 Macro (120mm equivalent)
F2.8 - 1/400sec - AutoISO200
Stacked in Photoshop and further edited in Lightroom Classic

After stacking but before cropping and processing in Lightroom