Well, school is over and I have no one to answer to but myself this week. Everyone seems to like my flower pictures best so I headed back down to the Botanic Gardens in Albuquerque to see what was in bloom. The Irises definitely had center stage but I also found some poppies and columbines to shoot. I was headed for a kind of edgy look with a detail extractor and bleach bypass filter in Nik Color Efex Pro. Then I added a Tonal contrast softening filter and it really made the Iris pop but in a very realistic way. Before taking the image into Nik I had added a Gaussian blur filter then masked out the part over the flower using a radial gradient on the layer mask. That gave me the blurred background but sharp flower I was looking for. The final touch was a lightening vignette around the edges.