Project 52 - Post Processing - Week 1

[Lon Howard]

Thanks, Geoff ... getting there. The little purple flower was burned once in PS ... seemed enough at the time.

[Letrow]

Lon, I like the flower and the structure that I can see in the petals. Nice, sharp and crisp. The background keeps distracting me though. You removed one purple flower, which is fine, but the bokeh is just slightly weird with black vague stripes in all parts.
I have used one of the blur functions in Gimp once on a photo, which gave me acceptable bokeh (can't remember which one I used right now, sorry). There is too much unrest in the photo for me now.

[Lon Howard]

Peter, I think unrest is a good way to describe what effect the background has in the image. I will give myself a small mulligan in that it is a vacation snapshot and that the unrest is caused by whatever else was growing around the poppies. The unrest is probably unavoidable given the conditions but still I have learned quite a bit by working through it here.

I tried a number of things to compensate for the unrest: smudging, cloning, content-aware fill. The blur tool (not the filter) is especially frustrating because it is so weak; you have to apply it about 40 times at full strength to notice any effect, at least in the background area here. It had a much more discernible effect on petals but I wasn't going for the petals. I thought selecting the background with a Gaussian blur would do it but the blur carried over to the fringes of the petals and trying to mask that made me contemplate an early start to happy hour .

Finally, I tried surface blur as opposed to Gaussian and it apparently did the trick in spades. Not only did it not drift over into the petals but it also removed some fringing around them that was already there ... a very nice surprise. While I was at it I also reduced the exposure in the background as well and erased the distracting white spot on the left.

Thanks for all the help, and if there are any more ideas, my door is always open .

[Cantab]

I like your most recent version and am finding this thread helpful. Thanks for starting it.