Trying a close-up example using MS Picture It

Here is an attempt at blurring the background and contrasting the foreground (flower).

What do you think ?

Here is the original picture

Here is another example with the background darkened

And here is one with black-white background and only the flower in color

Here is another example

And here is the original

Ken, much prefer the first photo. Lily really jumps out at you.

Maxine

Here is a last example using a daylily

Beautiful lilies! I think I prefer the originals to the ones with the black background. In the one with the blurred background the lily doesn't jumpt out at you. It's fun to experiment though!

Judith

what camera are you using?

First one is so cute, but how you did this? Pl;ease share this trick with us.
Kaleem

Cool pics, Ken. I have that program too......how'd you do that? I don't think I've discovered that feature yet.

Mendy

I love the black backgrounds. Lots of times, I have things I would like to omit in the background. The blurred one is nice too. Looks like a good program.

susan

MS Picture It has some nice features... K., do you find it fairly easy to use?

I like the blurred background, and sometimes I would like to create a black background, too...

p.s. like your lily, too! :-) t.

The one with the black and white background looks totally sci-fi! I love it! But for displaying flowers, I really the originals with the "real" background!

Great camera...!

Me too, Sequee. It does make for a striking photo and I suppose it might be handy if you had an ugly background, I don't mind especially when it's amongst 'DG family'. But when I see that a photo that has been altered it makes me wonder if anything else have been 'doctored'.

Here is an example of lilium "Orania" with a fence background.

The the first photo I have take the background out
(I use the edgefinder tool... the magnifying glass next to the dotted selection tools)

In the second photo I show you what the lily looks like with the fence.

Orania umbel with fence in the background.

I confess, the first one is much prettier.

Do you use different layers, one for the foreground and one for the background? I'm trying to think of how to do that in photoshop.

That B&W would work well with a clump of flowers. They would look hand-colored. Nice with a few printed and framed. I have photoshop as well. Do you know anything about these features for photoshop?

Sadly, I'm a photoshop dummy. I only do very basic things at this point like crop pictures.

Photoshop has a tutorial on how to do this. It is build into the program. I don't have it anymore, but I learned to do this in Photoshop,too.