The original, nearly unmolested image is displayed in the Macro forum.
PP: selected the flower, put it on a black background, 8 bit, Polar Coordinate filter, Ctrl-J, Soft light blend, touched up some smears in the black, and sharpened. Oh yes, and transform/rotated the image a little CW to balance/level the look before the PC filter.
I'm thinking some color other than black and with a little pattern might reduce the in-your-face and harsh look of the black and give a bit more interest.
09-01-2010, 08:22 PM
denise ippolito
Douglas, I like this and the bold colors against the black BG really do pop of the page! I like the way the top petals curve to the center. Nicely done.:)
09-02-2010, 06:49 AM
Patti Edens
I love the contrast between the black background and the flower petals! The petals remind me of feathers for some reason and I also like the way the curve up and inward.
09-02-2010, 05:05 PM
Steve Adkins
Cool image and use of PC, Douglas! Anyone else think "Bananas" :)
09-02-2010, 08:44 PM
Kerry Perkins
Doug, I wouldn't change a thing on this one! I love the bold colors and the black bg really sets them off nicely. Excellent vision and PP skills!
09-03-2010, 01:07 PM
Douglas Bolt
Thanks, All.
I like it also, but I think it could be made much better. When I get some time, I'd like to see what a little pattern added to the black background would look like. Also, I'm thinking of decreasing the size of the flower a bit.
As to the comments about skills and vision, the feature of the original flower image that caught my eye was that it had a lot of black (single, uniform color) around the subject and I expected the petals to make nice curves above the dark center (base after PC) of the flower. Bees on flowers generally don't add much, IMO. But here, there elongated horizontal lines on the lower right side of the image seemed to play well off of the curved petals on the upper left.
