Lily for the Lady in Blue

Well... he said to have at it.

Edit: ~LinogeNL requested that I move this out of my scraps. I will be trying my hand at this one again once I receive the original from him. Please be sure to check out his gallery!!

This photograph was taken by ~LinogeNL. The original can be found here: [link]

I made a comment on the center being a little over exposed and he said I could feel free to edit it if I liked... so here is the result. I just thought I'd post it so I could send him the link.

I should have made better note of this for him, but here is the approximate list of what I did for post-work:

- Duplicated the background layer. Applied Shadows and Highlights until I got the petals looking the way I wanted. This caused the center to be very grey, losing that fabulous orange that I wanted to retain.
- Used the History Brush to return the center to its original state.
- I then added a Levels layer and I brought down the shadows and the mid-tones so the image had a little more pop.
- Used the Magnetic Lasso to select the center and do "Layer via Copy".
- Applied Shadows and Highlights to this layer. It was still too grey, so I used the history brush (at an opacity of 30% or less) to bring back select parts of the color without losing the effect.
- I then organized the layers into sets - the layers for the Flower Petals, the layers for the Flower Center, and then other layers (like levels and later, stamped images) in an Overall Flower set. This is because I wanted to apply certain effects and filters to certain layers. (Overall Flower set was on top, Flower Center was in the middle, and Flower Petals was on the bottom.)
- To the Flower Petals set, I believe I added a yellow filter and a dark green filter. The yellow was one of the two standards, the green was a forest green. I wanted to pull the cobalt color of the petals down a bit because it didn't look as natural as it could, I think.
- Then, I added a black photo filter to the Overall Flower set to give it more of a grey-blue effect.
- I then added a new, blank layer and pressed Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E to flatten the image while still retaining all of the layers under it.
- Things were noisy in some of the shadows, so I healed out a few random spots.
- A lot of red was starting to show up in the tips of the petals, so I used the color replacement tool to replace the red with a soft grey-blue. I kept the tolerance level around 30%. Some places required a lighter, greener color and a lower tolerance.
- I then applied another levels layer above the stamped layer to do some final tweaking.
- I duplicated the stamped layer and applied a Gaussian blur (Radius: 6 pixels, Opacity: 13%). Just for a slightly softer look.
- I then stamped this image onto a blank layer using Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E. I increased the canvas size quite a bit (200-300 pixels on the left and maybe 100 pixels on the top to give me room to crop a bit later…)
- I cropped out the bit of black border on the right and bottom.
- There was a hard line where the lily pad had been framed on the right, so I burned it so it looked rounded off. I got the amount of negative space to where I liked it, and added the white border. I added the extra negative space because I thought the cropping felt a little close on the previous version.

I don’t know, yet, what he thinks of this… but even if he hates the edited version, I hope it will offer some guidance on one (probably way too complicated) way of helping with overexposure…

Let me know if you have any questions…