About the Image(s)

I stumbled across a beautiful bouquet of sunflowers while grocery shopping a few days ago. There were 3 of these unique colored ones mixed with regular yellow sunflowers which was labeled Tequila Sunrise. I knew I had to choose one of the unique ones and take her portrait, LOL. Now I wish I had taken a photo of the intact bouquet as well because it was stunning. But...that's how it goes.

I used my 70 - 200 macro lens and placed her against a black velvet background and leveraged natural light coming from a large window. I had my camera on a tripod with camera settings of 96 mm at f 11, ISO 320, shutter speed 0.4 sec.

In Lightroom I adjusted overall exposure and then used masking in specific areas to reduce highlights and increase texture and clarity. I also darkened the background a bit more. I used the point color tool to select the greens and purples and worked on those color tones to enhance them.

In Topaz Studio 2 I applied the Smudge filter and adjusted it to add a little more movement and creaminess to the lines and textures. I'm torn about whether I should have just left the original texture and not used the Smudge filter. I'm curious about your thoughts on that. It may be so subtle that you can't even tell?