Making the leaf

This is something that I entered in a photo contest. Sadly, it didn't win but I'm still proud of it. Anyway, here's a walk-through of how I did the shot after the jump.

First, the set up.

Setting up the lights:

When shooting translucent material, I find that it always worked best when they are back-lit so I placed the leaf on top of a softbox that's facing the ceiling.

The LED light that you see on the photo above does not affect the overall exposure of the photo as I was using a fast shutter speed and a fairly high aperture and my ISO was at 100 so I need not worry about it affecting my photo. The LED was used to help me focus because I was using a 50mm lens with a single ring from an extension tube so my auto-focus is practically useless.

Getting some depth:

The first time I tried shooting the leaf, I laid it flat on the softbox which resulted in an image that showed the texture of the material of the softbox. My solution was to get a couple of toothpicks and glue them to a small piece of paper and laid it on top of the softbox which gave me enough distance to blur out the background.

Exposure:

Everything here was done manually and I can no longer recall the aperture or the flash power that I was using but I believe that the final shot that I chose was around -1 or so.

Post-processing

Black and white conversion

The first step was to add an Invert adjustment layer to make the white canvas black.

I then added a Channel Mixer adjustment layer.

I then ticked the Monochrome checkbox at the bottom-left corner of the box then added a lot of blue to make the dark gray area completely black and added a little bit of red to bring out some of the texture.

That's about all the adjustments that I did.

Sharpening 

To sharpen the image, I selected the background layer and made a duplicate. I then selected Filter > Other > High Pass...

This isn't the exact value but this is around that neighborhood. The main thing that I focused on here was to sharpen the edges of the leaf.

I then changed the blending mode of the layer to Overlay and adjusted the opacity a bit.

The entire post-processing only took a few minutes since I have already visualized the end result even before I started shooting. I've realized that it's always a good idea to know what you want to achieve before you shoot.