from Butchart Gardens

Comments, suggestions, ratings appreciated on this altered image.

Started out as very nice color slide, with yellow waterlilies.

Digitally altered by desaturating, toning, leveling, etc. Caveat--my

PS skills are both intuitive and marginal. At some point I need to

learn about layers and various this and that.

 

Does this version seem effective? I like it, obviously, since it

seems a little

different. Thanks for any input.

I'm not sure about the light blur on the upper part of the flowers... Maybe works better in color.

Nice.

Here are my ideas for what they're worth:

Lighting : at first it looks like a beam of light coming from the right across the tops of the flowers, but then I think there needs to be some shadow on the left. Or you could think of it as flowers with luminous centres, but then the front petals should be darkened a bit especially those furthest from the centres and the inside back petals lightened.

 

Also the blur across the back/top of the petals looks a bit out of place.

 

PS I'm a PS beginner too, so I know that it's easier said than done ... And I do like what you've done here.

Looks like a painting to me. Very nice!

I like the idea here, but the whole shot appears pretty "soft". Maybe just the Jpeg artifact. I was doing loads of Color slide to B&W conversions, but lately I'm using B&W neg film. I think I can see your editting on the tops of each of the lillies (it looks "smudgy"). The Lasso tool (freehand) is really great for uneven edges like this, then you can "feather" the edge of your adjustments (I feather at 75 pixels for hi-res images). From that selection, then, I make an Adjustment Layer>Levels (or whatever). Then you can select "Inverse" for different Levels to the rest of the shot. Quick and easy. Photoshop is an art in itself. cc

Nice diagonal comp, very good light, 6/6

Jim, thanks for your comment.