Tulip

Tulip, originally uploaded by marush1.

This is a reworking of an old image. What surprised me was how far I have come in my post processing since this image was take 5 years ago. A few moves in Photoshop and what would have taken me hours took less than a minute.
The image was taken in 2005 at the Chelsea Flower Show. It was a technically correct, but pretty average, close-up record of a tulip.
I needed an image of this type for a Flickr group I use so I went back to the original Raw image and opened it in Photoshop. A few touches in ACR with my current workflow and I already had a more satisfying image than the original but there was still something missing. I added a touch of vignette but it still needed a lift so I duplicated the image (after saving as a PSD and then flattening the working image in Photoshop) applied a fairly large Gaussian blur to the duplicate and set the blend mode to Multiply. Setting the opaciry of the duplicate layer to about 80% gave me the look I wanted and that you see here.
Believe me when I say It has taken longer to write about than to do.