Cdouthitt Loc: Traverse City, MI

I took no offense to it. While I'm good at editing, there are still a lot if people that are better at it. I just tend to not spend a ton of time on other people's photos, unless I'm getting paid to do so.

Cdouthitt Loc: Traverse City, MI

I agree, but there are still a lot of people that are afraid/plain just don't want to get into post processing...which I don't understand, but it's not really for me to understand. To each their own. The whole intent of why I started this thread was to hopefully show that while SOC photos can be nice (and few and far between) but that they can be slightly edited to pull out the full potential of an image.

BigDaddy Loc: Pittsburgh, PA

The first one is about as perfect as you can get. You could change it a bit in pp but not sure you could do much more than make it a little different. I don't think I'd bother trying, and so far, that image is as close to meeting the challenge of the subject of the thread. IMO of course, which is worth about what y'all paid for it.

BigDaddy Loc: Pittsburgh, PA

I assume you are responding to my post. I didn't think you took any offense to what I said, I was just expanding on what you said.

When I first looked at the photo, the whites and the haloing stood out to me. I was thinking about how I would go about fixing the whites when you posted the fix. Your work was excellent. Removing the rose would be a lot easier than what you did. The haloing would be too time consuming for another's picture. It was the haloing that made me guess (wrong) that the photo was edited.

I didn't notice the rose until you fixed the whites. I'm often amazed at some of the stuff I miss on an initial edit.

greg vescuso Loc: Ozark,Mo.

I really like your first one. This is about as good as it gets soc. You were able to use the natural light and compose, meter and capture this image perfectly.