“Dogwood” by solareclips

I would love to see the centre of this bloom a little more to the right and placed in the top right hand corner – it would benefit from more saturation of colour but there is no BOH (blown out highlights) which I would imagine would be so easy to get in those lovely soft pink petals. all just my opinion tho :)

Moving it to the left would eliminate the red blotches on the left and put the detailed shadow, which is definitely a great point of interest, more center stage. Photoshop has one filter I use a lot, especially with macros – the Sharpen Edges filter. This photo would benefit from it. Adding contrast would give it the needed brightness. There is, of course, many different ways of making adjustments and changes to any photo.

I like the shadow cast onto the petals. However, focus of the central floral parts should ideally be razor-sharp, and this is not so. Keith

This is true and no amount of adjustments will change that.

I played with this, uncropped, in PS. Brightness -45 / Contrast +25 / Saturation +25.
I came up with a darker version that had a richer, softer look.

Hi Solareclips – I apologise if me previous comment was a bit abrupt – we were about to go for a walk and I wanted to ‘finish quickly’! However, the walk afforded me some time to think about some positive suggestions.
Re getting sharp focus: I envy those fortunate enough to own an SLR with assisted manual focus. In the absence of this, what I do may be of interest to you. Holding the camera in a fixed position, I shoot about twenty shots one after the other, pausing with each one at half-shutter position to allow the autofocus to stabilize. I then quickly compare the 20 shots, discarding those with any blurring in spots where I hope for sharpness. Then finally selecting the best of the best using maximum zoom-in on a suitable edge. It often amazes me the amount of variation between shots that were all supposedly ‘the same’.
I trust that the above will be of some use to you or others. Keith.

Thank you all for your wonderful comments, I’m sorry that it took me so long to get to them. I was checking after I posted, and there wasn’t anything for so long I guess I assumed that no one would comment. Thank you all again for taking the time to help me out!!

I like the image, and disagree with keith about the need for absolute sharpness the image artistically it calls for a bit of softness to go with the colors of the flower. I would crop it differently but that’s just a personal preference. As it’s part of the flower perhaps moving the center to one of the golden rule axis (1/3’s) might give it better ballance.