Poppies

I don't often set out to produce a wildly colourful abstract, but they so frequently turn out that way. I started with this picture, shot with iPhone, of spent poppy flowers in a display cabinet in a museum in Tasmania.

Then, I cropped it in Snapseed and increased the ambience slightly. I also played with the 'details' feature a little. I wanted to give it a more graphical feel.

Then, I opened image 3 in iColorama, aiming to further develop the graphic feel. I'm feeling that this image wants to be less a photo of poppies and more a picture of them. I put the image through 'Flow' (option 1) in the Effects menu. Then, from the Tone menu, I chose one of the tint options - 36/54. I love this feature of iColorama.

Now, I'm getting somewhere, as I have a nice 'pop art' feel happening. Next, I open the image in Decim8 and try random combinations of effects. Sometimes this process just doesn't work and sometimes it does. I usually save several different versions, once I've found a combination of effects that work for me. I chose to proceed with the one below.

Now, I have introduced some pleasing new elements to the image, but it is clearly unbalanced now. So, it is back to Snapseed for another crop. Then, I take the cropped image into Glaze and process it using what I refer to as the 'Sunset 2' option.

This doesn't represent an improvement, but that's not what this version is for. Now, I use this image as the background and image 5 as the foreground in a composite created with Superimpose. I've used multiply mode.

The final edit is done in Snapseed - I've had a look at what 'Auto Correct' does to the image, and reduced the value to 25 and also added a centre focus adjustment (Portrait 1).