I had been wanting to do close up backlit leaves for a while now. Cleaning some photos I found some Oak leaves that I had shot photos of this past summer that were perfect for such a project. Luckily it was a mostly overcast day and I shot them on a concrete back ground so they made for a good starting texture.
Everything done with Cycles including coloring and compositing. I think it’s 150 samples, 3000x2400 took 1:40 or so I think with the CPU (don’t have a GPU yet)…
Here’s a few images of the setup and what have you. The scene is really simple. Made a tree with sapling, kept some of the leaves and a single branch (those leaves are background leaves). The main leaves were done with ‘Image as Plane’ (two different leaf textures) then subdivided the heck out of it, removed extra vertices. Lightly shaped, then displaced. I use the textures alpha mask to clean up the rest of the mess which is evident in the clayish image particularly around the leaf stem. I used a HDR image for the lighting and background in the original. So when I went to do the clayish render I had to setup some lamps to have it make some sense and changed the background for fun.
I would have included the node setup but it relies heavily on getting the texture images setup right plus a hand drawn layer in Photoshop for some of the ‘effects’ to work out properly. Hopefully I can get some spare time to write up a proper explanation, otherwise it’s just kinda mean to throw a setup out there that won’t look as good if you don’t know what was intended with the textures.
Very well done
I tried to do a similar scene a while ago and now how hard it can be to get the leaf shader right. And yours looks amazing!
Would it be possible for you to share a screenshot of the cycles node setup ? I would love to take a look at it
Can you show us the scene? 
