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So I thought I would too! Focus stacking, that is!

As you can tell, I have some tulips in the house. They are the result of a marital misadventure that I won't go into here.

I thought I would try a focus stack. Not having a rail, I just refocused through the flower. I probably needed to use a smaller aperture for starters, and I would therefore have more images to stack.

I used a trial version of Helicon for this one. I did try PS but I got a better result with the specialised software.
I realise that I have a lot to learn - I can see some room for improvement here.

Over to you.

Hi Trevor - nice work - looks pretty good to me. I like it on the blue background but I think you might need a brighter yellow for that dark shade of blue? (I don't like the red line around the edge of the image tho). I think it maybe looks a little strange just floating in space without the stem anywhere - perhaps even an oof one would give it something to stand on.

Hi Rodney and thanks for the comments.

I have no idea where that red line has come from. I didn't know it was there until I read your post. A mystery that I will have to backtrack to find the cause.

As for the stem, I understand your thoughts and even thought through the issue myself. The flower is still living and is attached to a stem. You cannot see it because of the angle of the shot - I wanted to look straight down into the bowl of the flower.
I agree that it does look as though it is floating, but I would prefer not to add an artificial stem.

I will have a play with the colours too. I may lighten the blue instead of darkening the yellow, although the blue is much darker here than it appears in the original.

Thanks again for the crit.

Edit: It would appear that the red line is telling me that the image has been resized because it is too large. *smack on the wrist*

It is not bad, in fact is quite good. One thing that
jumps to my eyes is the leaves/petals seem to have
some detail and so is the central stem, but around
it is blurred without sharpness or detail and yet my
head tells my eyes there should be.

I don't think I am making any sense...

zafra52 wrote:It is not bad, in fact is quite good. One thing that
jumps to my eyes is the leaves/petals seem to have
some detail and so is the central stem, but around
it is blurred without sharpness or detail and yet my
head tells my eyes there should be.

I don't think I am making any sense...

Yep - I know what you mean. It is one of the faults I had identified myself. It seems that there is a gap in the slices that are blended to make up the final image, so it's down to operator error.

Thanks for the critique.