This picture I took during my cousin Marge's garden wedding at Oasis Manila. Sister and I arrived at the venue quite early, so we took the privilege of roaming around for subjects we could capture. I found it nice that sister now has her own camera, which meant we could set a photo walk soon.
Anyway, there were quite a lot of water lilies near the bridgeway - some white with yellow center, some purple, and a few pinks. Some flowers were too far so I had to rely with the zoom, but this one particular lily was close enough for me to bend over and take a macro picture. However, the fear of me falling over or me accidentally letting go of my camera into the pond caused me not to create the depth I wanted, so for my edit, I made sure the focus is going to be on the flower (and the cute bee) and not on anything else in the image.
Like I always do whenever I wanted to create that depth of field, I start with the original size (2816x2112 pixels), and made a selection around the flower and its stalk, feathered it, and made an inverted selection.
Using the Gaussian Blur tool, I blurred the selection at 25px. Resized the image to the usual size (640x480 pixels) and used the "Fake HDR Plus" action to create quite a dark and strong image.
I then added a layer of Kim Klassen's "Happy Heart" texture, set to screen at 40%. I opened another Kim Klassen texture - "Shine", and ran the "Sunshine Action" to it to change a little of its tone. This edited texture I layered on top of my water lily image, set to Overlay at 80%. Flattened the image.
Final steps I usually do then follow - National Geographic script, Burn tool, then Unsharp Mask.
Creating edits are always random. I have downloaded a few scripts and actions from the GIMP Registry, and at times I try to use the actions/script that are rarely used. If it works, I'd proceed, if not, I will go back a few steps. There are times the final edit won't satisfy me and would go back to the first step, but for this image, everything just came together, making this one of the fastest edits I have done.
