Chris, I worked on these three and cleaned them up a little. Hope you don't mind.

VisLP

Two things.

1. Beg borrow or steal an off camera flash. Set it approx. 45 degrees to the side of the flowers. Diffuse it with something white. (if you do not have a stand and a shoot through umbrella)

2. When shooting flowers you always want 1 or 3 flowers in a shot, never two or four. (odd number) If you have more than five it's OK to put all of them in the photo. Use rule of thirds! :wink:

Looks good on the dark areas, but what about the green areas?

Way underexposed! But, what concerns me is you said it is SOOC. If that's the case, then your camera isn't working right. It shouldn't be that dark if your camera says it's exposed properly. Also, which Dell monitor did you purchase? I just purchased the U2410 for $500

Keep practicing! I'm NO expert at PP work yet either. I still struggle with it, but I know a lot more than I did just 1 year ago. I still have LOTS to learn.

Keep in mind this was REAL quick. I did a color correction to get rid of some of the blue. No where near perfect. I also sharpened it

I did a quick correction on #1, but won't post unless you give me the OK. I'll be gone for awhile, but will check back later.

What MWAC said but I'd like to add that #1 is VERY soft on focus. #2 in better on focus, but a little soft. I'm not sure why #1 is so blue looking, I'm not sure if it's WB or something else. It almost looks like a blue haze in the air though. I'm sure it's just a simple WB adjustment

It's kinda dark on my calibrated monitor. What I'm seeing when zoomed in is mottling of the colors over the entire photo indicating underexposure.

Don't know if this is what you're looking for or not. Can you tell us more about the new program?

There's definitely the lighter areas on both faces, but definitely no "hot spots" that I can see. Looks pretty good to me on this calibrated monitor. Kids can be hard to shoot! Only thing I personally might have changed, was to remove the little boys vest. The one thing I'm seeing appears to be some what of a haloing affect around both. Did you select them from the background to do some work on it?

I think you did good!

LOL! I can give it a shot, but there's really not much to tell. Open the photo in what ever photo editing program you want to use as long as it has "Cloning and Healing" capabilities. (in my case it was Gimp) Zoom in fairly large (I went to 800% because of the small photo) Pick the cloning tool and (In Gimp) you need to hold the Ctrl button to choose an area you want to use to "fill in" with. A sample area if you want to call it that. Let go of the Ctrl button and start painting in the area to clone. (the target area) You need to keep choosing a new cloning area each time you move to a new area that is either a different texture or color to keep it looking real. For those that have never done it, it's not all that hard, just a little time consuming. I probably spent 20 minutes on all five photos. Once you get the parts "cloned" the way you like them, then you need to choose the "healing" tool and repeat the procedure over the areas you just cloned to smooth and feather everything out. When you're working in very close like this you think it will look terrible when you're done, but once you zoom out you'll see very little distortions in the photo like you do when zoomed in. It's NOT hard, it just takes practice to learn what you need to do to make it look this way.

Hope this helps, if not reply back and I'll TRY to explain better! :lol:

VisLP

The one that was trimming trees 1 1/2 miles east of me a few years back used the large circular blades. I wouldn't have believed it would work if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. It looks like it would pull the copter out of the sky when it made contact with the trees, but it doesn't. Makes one heck of an eerie sound when it's working. Fun to watch! Oh, and it doesn't trim small limbs, it trims BIG limbs as well!

Yea, I like the way the petals came out white, but I don't really like the green in the stem. The stem on the second is a more true green.

Tamron 17-50mm @ 50mm
ISO 100
f/5.0
Shutter 1/50

Camera set to manual with Canon 580EX set to manual 1/4 power

Decided I better get a couple of shots of our daffodils before all the rain hits tomorrow. They probably won't look so good after it rains for three days. Let me know which version you like best. One is auto WB and the other is Flash WB. I used a flash on these, and the flash version is more true to color.