Onslow/Richard I love what you did there... And don't tell me all you did is flip my image and crop it??? Doug this is pretty much the whole flower, I cropped off the edges because I didn't want anything in the image that wasn't petals! Both of these images are postworked the original is pretty sharp but not razor sharp. Sharp isn't what I am aiming for though, Margana guessed that right I want the middle defined like what Richard did in post #13, not razor sharp but sharp enough so you can see the detail still and not look like crapola, and then I want the edges to flow into a nice silky, feminine, dreamy kind of image. Geeze did that make any sense??? This time it is Onslow/Richard that got the desired effect. When applying these filters it applies it to the whole image, I haven't figured out how to get the center semi sharp. I am missing something here, I know I am missing something here but I don't know what it is... Now that I look at it, Andreas yours doesn't look too bad either, but see how the center flows in Richard's version? And he didn't even have the original... I am having one hell of a time perfecting this technique so I guess I need to figure out what it is I am missing... I make three layers, one sharpened, one adjusting the hue, saturation and lightness (0, -70 and 0) and the third I apply a guassian blur using a radius of 32.64 (because the size is w 3264 x ??) I think it is, then I blend the layers one by one using whichever setting seems to be giving me the proper "look" I have tried erasing out the edges of the sharper rose but that isn't working either. I am very frustrated with these roses, so frustrated in fact I am on the verge of saying bag it and deleting them all... Yeah, yeah, yeah I know it is easier to shoot with a soft focus filter, but before I buy one of those I am going to frustrate the hell out of myself doing it this way... And I will learn from this... Hmmmmm maybe if I reshoot I should go with a very shallow DOF? maybe that would help??? Brenda :'(