Towards the end of 2007 I was working on a special project that involved photographing, scanning, and Photoshopping flowers and insects using a variety of techniques. This beetle ended up looking pretty psychedelic.

I’m preparing a case study explaining the post-processing workflow of my green Dragonfly image for a Mac users group in Emeryville next week. Looking through my back files in the area of the dragonfly work, I came across the early stages of the work on this beetle (Stephanorrhina gaffata from the Cameroons). It seems to me that his natural colors are quite fantastic enough.

View this image larger.

The moral here is to archive carefully every version of a digital file, and to always shoot to keep as much information as possible by using your camera’s RAW format. If you don’t know how to process the file today, you may in the future.