Roses & Editing

I have been trying to experiment more with editing lately because there are all these trendy edits floating around cyberspace. Sometimes when I wonder "How did one of my students get that effect?" and then I know I am being passed up!

I've been experimenting with different pops of colors, saturation vs. desaturation, lighting, layer masks and texture in photos, as well as starting with a particular action in photoshop to speed up the process and then going from there.  I thought that a nice subject for these edit experiments would be these beautiful roses Karl bought for me.   I really like how these edits turned out!  Side note - the composition on a few of these was not very strong when I first took the image.  Later I was able to crop it into what I feel is a much stronger photograph.  Yay for cropping (and clone tool so I could clone out my feet standing on my kitchen table in the straight down shot)!