macro Wildflower

I was able to blur the background as someone suggested from a previous post. Any other

comments are welcome. thanks

Impressive ! It's hard to find this kind of amazing flower. Good job !

I like the idea of blurring the background, but in this case I think you went about it in the wrong way. The fact that you used PS or some other editing software to do the blurring is far too obvious. What would probably work best is getting the right DOF set when actually shooting the photo.

 

Either way, the colors are stunning.

 

I'm sure you could make the blurring work well in PP, but you just maybe need to play around with some different techniques.

This was taken near Lake Casitas in S. Cali.

I had forgotten my macro lens and thought i would e doing mostly landscapes so i had to use a shorter focal length lens and an extension tube. I would have liked to have a better DOF from the shooting. Are you seeing some sort of PS artifact?

Mark, this is a really a great shot 7/6. What did you do in PS to blur the background? You have some very nice shots in your portfolio as well. What do you teach? Happy shooting, Dave

I used the magic wand to select all areas outside of the flower. I made a duplicate layer. i then used refine edge or you can use feather. I think I used about setting 3. Then I used a Gaussian blur to blur the background. I used layer mask and a 50% brush to paint back any bleeding that occurred at the edges with the blur. THis was the hardest part to get right. I then merged the layers and used selective sharpen using a Photokit Sharpen--- a third party plugin. That was about it.

Mark, that is about what I do as well - except I seem to get pieces of teh flower or don't get some of the background. The magic wand in CS2 does not seem to be able to distinguish perfectly at the edges even when set on 1 or 2. I never used refine edge. Which menu is it in? I have tried feather, but that seemed to smooth the corners. Do you see something I am doing wrong? Thanks for your answer above. Did you ever find a post processing artifact - I looked and could not find one. It looked perfect to me. This is beautiful no matter what you did to achieve it!!! Happy shooting, Dave

No.. i don't see an artifact. The refine edge is only in CS3. It works better than the feature. If you make the layer at the end and use a brush ---- make sure you use an opacity of about 30 percent and then go over the appropriate areas in a painting like manner

Mark, thanks for letting me kn ow about the CS3 feature. By the way, I tried something else to help the bleeding problem. It has worked every time I used it. After I isolate a area and paste it, I duplicated the background layer and after working the paste, I merge the duplicate and the paste, then merge that with the original backgroud layer. If you try this, let me know how it works for you. Happy shooting, Dave

The bright orange/yellow/brown flower is beautiful and you captured it nicely down to the artistic painting of the white dots in the middle of the flower around the browns. Have you ever thought of painting the background a nice contrasting color? To me the background is a little distracting from the beauty of the flower. Still, very good photo shot!