THEME: Purple Water Lily

An oldie, but I haven't previously posted it, and it fits the theme. Critique away!

The short version: Scanned a "ho-hum" slide of a water lily with ugly dead gray water from an overcast sky, did lots of stuff to it in PS.

The details: 17 layers in PS, in order from bottom to top. (Yeah, it could have been done in half the number of layers, but this was quite a while ago:D.)
1. Cloned out a bunch of distracting stems in the water, and replace the flat gray with a pale blue.
2. Completely desaturated.
3. Merged visible, applied moderately strong sharpening, then applied bas-relief filter.
4. Applied a medium blue tone with a hue/sat layer.
5. Copied just the background from the base layer (1) and blended in hard light.
6. Copied just the lily pad from the base layer (1), at 50% opacity.
7. Copied the lily and reflection from the base layer, blended in hard light.
8. Merged visible, applied stained glass filter.
9. Copied layer 8, applied a spotlight effect on the flower, blended in lighten.
10. Hue/sat layer: +85 sat, -20 lightness.
11. Copied lily reflection from layer 7.
12. Lightened reflection with levels white point at 139.
13. Copied flower petals from layer 7, increased contrast with USM 25/50/0.
14. Copied just the flower center from layer 7.
15. Applied a strong contrast boost to just the petals with curves.
16. Hue/sat layer masked to flower center, +100 sat, +10 lightness in yellow channel.
17. Darkened UL & LL corners.

I like the bold colors on this, but I'm not so sure about the green in the upper left hand corner (Just my opinion). The backround kinda looks like a huge beehive that's exploded with color. Really neat affect.

Chris, Very nice colors for the lily and the background. I like the tiny tiled look to the BG. Very nice embossed look w/ an almost foiled look to it. I might crop just below the dark spot in the URC. Looks like alot of steps-but well worth the effort. Fantastic!

nice color, for my taste would have liked the mosaic tile effect include the flora also.
Thanks for detailed pp

Chris, Nice to have you back! I love the effects and the lighting. The "foil" look is awesome! Great use of the stained glass. A small crop off the top if you wanted. The reflection is such a nice element within the image. Beautiful color combo! Very nicely done.

Chris, hi! I love the mosaic look to the bg and the foil effect on the flowers. And thanks so much for your
workflow - I'm impressed.:)

Hi Chris, Beautiful image! Love the effects you used and great colors.

Excellent the way this jumps out. The colours and lighting are bang on. Nice texture o in this.

Danny.

Chris,

You really worked hard on this photo. Like the effect.
Thanks for sharing...
______________________
Charlie Wesley
St. Augustine Beach, FL

Nice effect and colors. Very good composition.

Thanks to everyone for your comments and compliments! Here's a slight rework with the lily pad at UL (and the dark area at UR) removed. I think I do like it better.

Dave Phillips,
Here's why I didn't just stop with the mosaic/stained glass flower; not to argue, but just to share my thought process.

You can see on the left (before applying the spotlight) that there's just not much variation of color & tone in either the petals or center, and none at all in the dark reflection; it looked too flat to me, and I wanted some strong dimensionality.

On the right the spotlight effect has been added, and it further degrades the definition in the flower, but I liked the glow on the BG, so in my final version I recreated the flower above the spotlight layer.

Repost looks great, Chris! I might have left a little more room at the top, but no biggie. Thanks for sharing your thought process.