Water Lily

[Julie Brown]

Took this at Anhinga Trail last March. :cool:

Basic exposure and color adjustments tweaked in Lightroom with Nik software; applied cross processing filter in ColorEfex Pro; then paint daubs filter in PSE.

[Mark Fuge]

Nice image and application, Julie.

Like the painted effect added.

I might have cropped it a little on the left and/or added a little canvas to the right. But ...

Your image ... your vision.

[Paul Lagasi]

Nice...sharp, colorful, nice background, nice PP effect....my mind sees an alien mouth with teeth, one eye..to much caffeine...

[Jackie Schuknecht]

Julie I like the angle you shot this from, I like Mark's idea of cropping some from the left and adding canvas to the right.

[Kora Baker]

Incredible plant and capture, Julie. Your pp works very well. I like Mark's suggestion to crop LHS and add to RH:)

[denise ippolito]

Julie, The BG is very complimentary. The crop suggestion sounds good. It does have an alien look to it. Very cool and your PP work is subtle and well done.

[Harold Davis]

i agree with the crop suggestion also, but will add that if you had panned the camera down and gotten the entire base at the water line with that little ripple of water around it, this would be off the charts!!! i love the PP work. gotta love the nik stuff!!!!

[Julie Brown]

Thanks for the comments and suggestions Mark, Paul, Jackie, and Denise. I went back and cropped, then added canvas to the PSE tiff because I couldn't replicate everything exactly that I did to the Raw file.

I thought it looked like an alien head myself!:D Here is the repost.:)

[Harold Davis]

julie, i misread and i apologize. i was thinking a crop off the bottom.

[Julie Brown]

Harold, I think my thought process on the crop was to eliminate the shadows and to isolate the bloom. Here I will repost with the same PP steps (might have introduced more noise), but this one reveals the whole ripple, the plant's shadow, and another lilly that has not opened yet. What do you think, should I have cloned out the shadows?:confused:

[Harold Davis]

thanks for posting that, julie. call me crazy, but i'd go with your original comp to include all of the base with the ripple and clone out or quick mask the shadow. you can get away with that in OOTB!!!!:D

[Kora Baker]

I like the original better too, Julie. And I like Harold's idea to leave all the base and just clone or mask out the shadow. With the other unopened bloom in situ it looks very muh to me like the adult bloom is giving advice to the baby bloom:D

[Julie Brown]

OK, Harold, here is my third try. I cloned out the shadow and the other plant. This one still includes room on the right side. :)

[Julie Brown]

That is a good one Kora-giving advice to the baby bloom!:D

I read your comment after I reposted again. Do you think baby bloom should stay in?

[Kora Baker]

Like the repost better Julie, but I do think the baby bloom adds a nice bit of balance:)