OK Guys:

I have been a lurker, and after a two-step program, I overcome my shyness and opened a Gallery, posted a image, and here I am.

My stepdaughter gave my wife a orchid a few months ago,and told her to take good care of it, she has, and a few days ago it bloomed. The photo's in the gallery are before, and a selection. Thats as far as I got. I want to send this to my step-daughter, but my creativity is -110%. I have been working on getting my selections to a reasonably fair condition. Using PSE 6 made it a lot easier.

What I've done to the selection so far is Adjust Brightness to +11 and and Contrast to + 57. I tried to get a background but came up with either to light or to Dark So I setteled with Grey for this post. I Tried with a B&W background and coloing the flower trying to get the color to pop but really was still to much distraction in the bacground.

Hankw

Hank, First of all, welcome out of the lurkers' den. Your orchid pics are great. You did well with the selection. You are primed to get creative. I won't suggest anything other than think what your daughter might like and enhance in that direction. Some kind of backgroundcoordinated in color, maybe some kind of texture. There are so many etc's. Check out some of the tutorials and some of the homework in the challenges. Enjoy. Again welcome. Some of the real creative ones will be along shortly to help.

Welcome hank, thanks for joining us. You did a great job on the orchids.

Welcome Hank. I hope you become very comfortable here. You're definitely among friends. The orchids are beautiful, and you did a nice selection. You said you tried a B & W background.....did you just use white? I think white would look very nice, but I'm not artist. Is there enough of the stem showing in your original picture (it's small, so I couldn't really tell) to select the stem, too? If there is, it might look nice to have the stem hit the edge/border so the flowers have an anchor point. Just a thought. Again, welcome, and take everything I say with a grain of thought, because I'm still pretty low on the learning curve.

Hi Hank, nice to see you are an ex-lurker. Look forward to seeing more of you. The orchids are beautiful. I agree with Sunny on the stem and having and anchoring point. You have done a great job of the selection which is a great start. You could use the original image as your background and blur it and maybe reduce the opacity some so as the orchids stand out. Put a wide border around it the color of the orchids with an inner beveled edge. There are a lot of possible variations you could do with this. Play and experiment with filters and tutorials. This would be a nice image to try Christell's Painting tut from the last newsletter.

On another note, why not add a link to your gallery in your signature. And maybe when you upload to your gallery upload larger images.

Here is a link to Hank's gallery for anyone who missed the orchids on the rolling gallery
http://www.prestophoto.com/photos/?user_id=15984

The image looks great Hank!
Welcome to the family.

Jump in on some of the challenges... fun and easy way to learn.

Welcome to the forum, Hank.

Hank, you did a great job with the selection.
A whole lot better than my first efforts.

It's always easier to fix it when you take the picture --- avoid doing heroic stuff in Elements. Either move the plant to avoid a distracting background, or cover the background with a solid color drape: sheet, blanket, whatever.

Stick around, you will have a lot of fun here.

Rusty

The orchids would look great as a breakout on a very, very pale pink background. They are lovely. Jean

To All:
Thanks for all your replies. It's supposed to rain all weekend so hopefully I'll get to work a little on these ideas over the weekend.....Hank