Nameless .

Any suggestions for a name/title?

The photo was taken at Knoebels Amusement Resort in Elysburg PA last month...

The background leaves and stuff were very noticeable, and I started out to blur them a little bit. In the first pass, I blurred the background a lot but it glowed way too much.. so then I darkened it and blurred just a little, but it didn't feel quite right, still... finally I blurred it a lot with a darker background...

and this is the result. I still have a glow that adds a bit of interest, but the flower itself is all natural, as it came from the camera.

Tools used: Paint.Net
Method:
I duplicated the flower into a 2nd layer.. then added an 'all white' layer in between (to help see what I was doing to the top layer)... I started deleting all the greenery from the top layer... and the one bud in the background on the upper right side... leaving only the blossom itself.

after some trial and error, I finally got all of the non-flower parts deleted, then I removed the 'middle layer' so that the top layer sits on top of the bottom layer.

At first, it appeared that I hadn't done anything, but at that point, I selected the bottom layer and started adjusting it.. In this version, I first darkened the layer by a setting of -30 (not sure how that equates to other software). I then did an "unfocus" set at 100.

I then added the frame and what you see is what I got.

Note that if I just wanted to unfocus the image without a glow, I could have selected the flower left on the top layer, then moved my selection area to the bottom layer, and deleted the flower from the bottom... then when I did the unfocus, there'd have been nothing there but the dark green vegetation to blur - and no 'glow' would have happened. The reason there's a glow is because an unfocus moves the bright yellow pixels in the bottom layer's version of the flower out a ways from the center... leaving in this case, a glow behind.

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Sorry for the long explanation... There have been a couple of my watchers that have traded tips with me... Not everyone uses PDN but even in photoshop I am sure that the methods are similar.

I hope that by sharing 1) you may figure out something useful to do similar to what I did and 2) you in turn may tell me what I did wrong - what would have been easier and less time consuming.

Altogether I probably spent 1.5 hours on this... part of it was learning the hard way (some of the way I started out deleting the greenery was very time consuming and I eventually figured out better ways)...

Inputs, thoughts, comments, questions?