This poppy is quite lovely Rita. I think the center whorl is the star of the show and since it was taken with a cell phone, it needs some sharpening and drama. The background red poppies are blurred, but still seem to detract from the main subject, especially the one directly above it; that one reminded me of a hand with the thumb in hitchhiker position. I worked a bit with your original image to see if perhaps I could coax out more details and make the main blossom stand out more. I rotated it slightly to put the stem on a bit more of an angle, cropped some of the distractions out, and cloned out some of the others. I sharpened the main blossom and used the dodge tool on the center whorl to pull out some highlights. I used Color Efex Monday Morning filter to darken it and then back into PS for the Oil Paint filter. I think your vision for this image was good; my version is just a bit different way of getting to the same end result, as you requested.   Posted: 11/12/2025 22:54:42

I love this poppy and all of the detail you captured of it's center. Like Jan, I feel there are some distracting elements in the image. I took your final image and tried a few things in Lightroom Classic:

- Reduced the highlights
- Cropped in to emphasize the main flower
- Used a mask on the upper right corner to open the shadows so it wasn't such a dark blob
- Used a mask on the poppy center and increased the exposure, texture, and sharpened
- Removed anything I thought was a distraction

I probably ended up with a very similar result to Jan's but I was curious to see how well Lightroom dealt with changing your final image rather than the original.   Posted: 11/18/2025 15:15:55