flower floating above the garden.

[alfredo]

[Mira]

1. Exactly. Floating. It's incongruous to see the color, the cool pink and the very

warm orange, and then the brilliance of the cool background. I always hasten to see what's new from you, be it color or b/w, just about always it's an image to study and get gripped by.
Thanks for being here so steadily, Alfredo!

[alfredo]

4. Thanks. I think rotating it 180 degrees plays tricks with

the eye. I did that to fix the composition to my liking. When I rotated the image, it threw me off balance a bit. Maybe because of the slight resemblance to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

[MissHoneychurch]

2. Cool shot

did you process the picture?

[alfredo]

3. I did. I pumped up the colors, wavelet sharpened, adjusted

the curves, then rotated it 180 degrees. I also cropped it a bit.

[MissHoneychurch]

5. I am always amazed

what one can do with those photoshop programs these days. I am still a novice in that direction.

[alfredo]

6. It just takes playing with it, trying different filters and controls.

I am using GIMP, a free editor.

[Saphire]

7. Very 3-D-ish. Cool.

[alfredo]

9. Thanks. I used a short depth of field, and positioned the flower

to hide the stem.

[Kind of Blue]

8. Magnificent! Thank you! n/t

[alfredo]

10. Kind of Blue, as in Miles Davis?

[Kind of Blue]

11. You Bet! My all-time favorite :)

:hi: So glad you made that assumption. It really worried me for a while that it may sound as if I'm not a true-blue Democrat.

[alfredo]

13. Make Miles Davis your avatar.

Kind of Blue is my go to CD. Jack Johnson, and On The Corner get good play here.

Joe Sample/Randy Crawford "Feeling Good" is my most recent acquisition.

[Kind of Blue]

14. Well, once upon a

time as young people, some friends and I were at a party with Miles in attendance and The Davis was just incredibly rude to one of us who simply gushed I love your music - it's helped me a lot. It was during the time when he was on crack or heroin or whatever. So I enjoy the music but not particularly the personality.

Joe Sample and Crawford, love them both. But my other go-to is Antonio Carlos Jobim.

[alfredo]

16. Songs sound better when sung in Portuguese.

Especially when sung by Mariza.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

12. Splendid!

[Blue_In_AK]

15. That's gorgeous, Alfredo.

Beautiful color combination.

[alfredo]

17. I clicked the shutter, but the flower did the hard work.

[alfredo]

18. First Rose - heavily processed.

I applied the Fake HDR plugin first. That adds several layers of varying transparency. I then added auto white balance and adjusted curves. I then applied the AgfaPan 25 plugin. This plug in only affected some of the layers. That allowed some color to come through. I flattened the image and added Wavelet Sharpen. What I wanted was to show the detail of the petals. The detail of the petals are usually missed when looking at a Rose.