Help with White Flowers

I posted the following in the macro forum but wasn't sure if I might not get more help here with regards to the white "hot" flower....fwiw, as I was going to photo this flower it was bright and sunny and just as I walked up the sun went in and it had a very overcast look....i wasnt able to wait for the sun to come back out...also if anyone wants to do additional PP and show me a better pic that would be great (and hopefully you will explain what you did)....as far as PP software goes...I am using Picasa and have 30 day trials of Photoshop CS3, Lightroom and Photoshop Elements 6.0....I was pretty much lost in CS3 and Lightroom was a bit daunting...I did however seem to like Elements....for this PP I used Picasa...oh and I also have the canon PP software too

From the Macro Forum:

Not sure if "Hot" is the right word or not but thats how the white of the flower looks to me....I do think it looks kinda cool but I am a newb and of course slightly biased too

anyway which of these look better (if either look good)....oh and its the same shot justs PP'd a bit differently


1/125 4.5 ISO400 NO FLASH(both images have been resized to 1024 and have NOT been cropped)

Eagle i wrote in post #5984549
I posted the following in the macro forum but wasn't sure if I might not get more help here with regards to the white "hot" flower....fwiw, as I was going to photo this flower it was bright and sunny and just as I walked up the sun went in and it had a very overcast look....i wasnt able to wait for the sun to come back out...also if anyone wants to do additional PP and show me a better pic that would be great (and hopefully you will explain what you did)....as far as PP software goes...I am using Picasa and have 30 day trials of Photoshop CS3, Lightroom and Photoshop Elements 6.0....I was pretty much lost in CS3 and Lightroom was a bit daunting...I did however seem to like Elements....for this PP I used Picasa...oh and I also have the canon PP software too

From the Macro Forum:

Not sure if "Hot" is the right word or not but thats how the white of the flower looks to me....I do think it looks kinda cool but I am a newb and of course slightly biased too

anyway which of these look better (if either look good)....oh and its the same shot justs PP'd a bit differently

1/125 4.5 ISO400 NO FLASH(both images have been resized to 1024 and have NOT been cropped)

To be honest i can't actually see any difference between the two shots.
Is it a really difficult game of spot the difference?

The shot unfortunately does not work
"for me at least" becuase it does not have any point of focus, my eye just keeps wandering up and down the image, i don't beleive the focus point is recoverable in any software on this shot. Was that how you intended it?

I like the first one, maybe make it warmer rather than cooler in the second one. Only thing I don't like about it is it seems slightly soft. It's really neat looking though, certainly interesting.

It is very soft..unless you want to make it a very soft watercolor like image.its not best to try to recover, just me. Hot sun, harsh light.impossible most of the time to get detail on whites and reds...

Well, I am seeing a slight difference between the two images...the first is a little pinker while the second is a little more blue. Between the two, the pink works better but honestly as has already been stated, this shot isn't really worth trying to "recover". It looks as though you had a really shallow DOF and the focus ended up being on the wing of the be instead of on it's eye(s). I'd just wait until you had a better picture to work with, but that's just my opinion.

I would like to add that yes, if you've never used Photoshop before (CS3 or otherwise), it can indeed be a bit "daunting". Don't feel bad if you didn't get it right away...I've been using Photoshop for many years now (since the intro of Version 4.0) and I'm always learning new things. The beautiful thing about Photoshop is that it is an incredibly powerful program. The bad thing about Photoshop is that it is an incredibly powerful program! LOL!!! There are folks who take full semesters in college on Photoshop and just walk away having scratched the surface. I would also add however that it -IS- worth learning. I've used many, if not most of the photo editing software packages out there over the last 10 years or so and I honestly feel that there is no substitute.

Good Luck,
Jim