Correcting a dark dull photo

[AmieBear]

Hi all i haven't been around for a while but I'm in need of some advice i have a photo (see full res here) that's very dull and dark I have tried adjusting levels but haven't been happy with the results, it looks dull or the image starts to break up any advice with making this photo better.
The photo is of my wedding flowers and my florist needs the photo for college she did our flowers for free so I feel bad giving her such bad photos as she was so kind to me.
Thanks in advance.

[philbach]

Well I opened the image using levels and touched the white cloth under the flowers with the white eyedropper using photoshop. But the flowers are wilted and to me that is the major problem.

[AmieBear]

I like what you hve done here any advice on the petals woud you use the smudge tool or clone.

[pixelzombie]

here's a quick correction using curves and H/S...

[AmieBear]

Thanks both i used levels and the eyedropper but faded it a bit and H/S its looking much better i also cropped and cloned out the tablecloth and touched up the worst of the wilting.
retouched version here

Would you do anything else?

[Viira]

Work layer samples included, if you have any questions, just ask ;]
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...ap/flowers.jpg

[AmieBear]

Wow great job Viira thanks

[smoothfluid]

I did the old LAB colour boost (convert to LAB, and adjust the A and B curve by 2 units, as in the screen-grab). In and ideal world I'd then mod the petals a bit more and work on the background, but at least we now have some colour and life back in the flowers, without it looking wacky.

[Verywierd]

What is spoiling the image is the discolouration of the roses. I used the "replace color" function to change the yellows and other off key colours on the petals back to a healthy pink, taking samples from the rest of the blossoms. A little contrast and saturation adustment.

[TommyO]

AmieBear,
I think your last retouch is very good. Would I do anything else? Maybe follow Veryweird's and Viira's technique for adjusting the petal color some more.

Also, I thought I would share another tip. When the image contains mostly color, contrast, clarity and some saturation problems it is often better (or just faster) to open it in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and do those edits there. It provides an excellent starting point for PS to do the remaining tasks, i.e. petal touch-up.

Below is an example of what 2 minutes is ACR did for the image, again with no petal touch-up's.

P.S. Even with jpg's there are some bit-savings (less destructive) in using ACR over PS. Not a lot, but some. The workflow is the main advantage, in that it is so much faster. With all the changes to ACR in CS3, it is almost a no-brainer.

[chillin]

I used targeted curves to make the flowers look healthy & some more curves adjustments to brighten the pic (turn on the lights) + D&B.

[AmieBear]

Thanks everyone i have so many great suggestions and quite a few flower pics to retouch so that gives me the perfect excuse to try them all.

[Flora]

Don't know if it's any good for your florist ... but I went for the spotlight romantic version ...

[alexandrab]

Hi,

Here's my take on the wedding flowers. I desaturated the yellow overcast in the pink by using hue/saturation (yellow saturation slider moved to minimum with a layer mask, so the yellow in the leaves remains unchanged). Then did some color replacement painting with pink over the roses on a duplicate layer. I lowered the opacity of his layer, so the pink colorizing would look more natural. Then worked with levels and shadow/highlights to get some decent contrast and brightness. That's basically it.