I was lost in this picture and just looked and soaked in its beauty. The lily blossoms seem to drink up the sunshine - although I didn't see the sun. *g* Except through the brillance of the clouds. Wow!!!

And that was a really great feeling! A picture of wonder~~

This is great work. The pictures are merged perfectly, as the sky is never distracting and adds to the surreal beauty of the compositon. A true joy to view. Thank you also for sharing the tutorial on how this image was mastered.

Great work. I like the effect. I have just purchased Photoshop CS and I'm looking forward to learning all it can do. I really like working with flowers.

I could say 1000 words, but please let this suffice:

WOW!

GARY

The lily was taken at Murray Park Arboretum. The clouds were taken in my front yard.

Sure. This took about 2-3 hours for me to do, but a lot of that was playing around with things to get it "just right".

Here are the steps I did in PhotoShop 6.

1. Picked 2 images that had potential (both the same size, in this case 1000x667). Btw, the source images for these were fairly boring.

2. Tweaked each image to make both good enough to stand on their own.

2a. I used "apply image" on the multiply setting on the clouds to increase their contrast, and I altered the histogram levels to increase the contrast even more.

2b. Altered levels on the lily to bring out it's colors a little.

3. The lily picture became my 'source' picture.

3a. I duplicated the lily background layer.

3b. On the duplicate, I extracted the lily. The extraction tool always leaves a few edges semi-transparent, so I used the stamp tool to fill in the gaps and keep the edges nice and solid. (This was the longest step.. was about 30 minutes for me. The stamins were the hardest and longest to deal with.)

4. I copied the cloud picture onto a layer in-between the extracted lily and it's background.

5. I turned on the grid guide. The grids were set to 1 inch.

5a. This allows you to select perfect squares as long as the "snap to" is turned on.

5b. I highlighted a few squares at a time on the cloud layer. Then when you press control-j, it puts the highlighted areas on a new layer. After I was happy with all of the pieces, I merged them all together, hid the original cloud layer, and reorganized it so that the pieces of the clouds were lower than the extracted lily, and the source lily was at the bottom so the clouds are sort of sandwhiched between the lily extract and the background.

6. To add a painted on grid, it's a little tricky. First you create a new image. I created this 1 in. by 1 in. in size. Then I hightlighted the whole image by pressing control-a. After this I 'stroked' the image (paint something around the highlight). This was set to 1 pixel and white.

6a. I copied this as a pattern. I think you go to edit -> define pattern.

6b. Back on the cloud image, I created a new layer on the top of the stack. Then I went to edit -> fill and selected pattern from the drop down menu. When the dialog box with all the patterns came up, I chose the one I had just made, and I unchecked the transparency box. When I hit ok, it pasted the pattern across the picture. This left a really bright white grid, so I went to the blending options and lowered the opacity down to 33% and selected the color overlay option. I chose the yellow from the center of the flower using the eyedropper tool.

7a. Save for the web. I saved it as a jpg and optimized it for 500kb which ended up saving it at about 90% or so. The file at this point was 1000x667. The Lens Flare website resized it to 500 pixels wide so that's why the boxes are not 1 sq. inch anymore.

Thanks everybody for taking a peek at my picture. I asked a few Yahoo Groups, that I'm a member of, to come and take a peek. I appreciate all of you doing that.

Nice creative image.

Like your transition works with your

colorful Description .

Keep up the good work

Great shot.