A shot of this years birthday present from my wife for you all to play with!

I look forward to seeing the results!

Kort, thanks for the reminder!

The image is a bit small to work with Mark...could you give us something a little larger? That said, I am not sure what we could do to it to improve it, you've made it quite lovely as its. Nice b-day present. :)

Sorry about that still not used to what I can and can't do size wise on the forum.

This should be a larger version of the same capture.

I'm not happy with this its almost there but I'm still not 100% about it.  It needs something I can't figure out (probably very simple) to bring it up to par.

That's better, thanks. Well, there is a lot going on here. To me, the exposure was off a bit, very contrasty. I adjusted it in shadows/highlights to lighten the darks and darken the lights. I copied the layer and made a multiply layer for the top one and set it to 24% opacity. I then sharpened that layer heavily, but since it was mostly transparent the effect is not so harsh. Lastly I made a layer for the bright white highlights and softened them a little.

Perhaps you could go into the front circle where you can see the innards and saturate that a little more too. I went the other way and made this B&W and then gave it a bit of a sepia/gold tint. I should have tried to avoid the haloing (look around the watch hands) but missed it when doing the shadows/highlights the first time around.

I like both of those particularly the first you posted!  I really must start using layers more as I have very little experience with them.

I thought I would try a sharpening technique that reduces the haloing effect Kort mentioned then adjusted the shadow and highlights since I had never tried that before.

Sharpening.
Image>Mode>Lab Color
Select the lightness channel.  Its in the box with layers and paths
Apply Unsharp Mask w/ Amount 100%, Radius 1, Threshold 4 OK this
Ctrl F twice.  applies the mask two more times
Image>Mode>RGB
Shadow/highlight  shadow 80% highight 10%.

Thanks for sharing that technique! The haloing effect was from my use of shadow/highlight though, not sharpening, and I could have avoided it if I had been more careful.

Aha!  Sorry about that, been reading too much about sharpening lately.  I guess haloing has multiple sources, maybe thats in the next book.

That's okay, sharpening can cause it too. ;']

Well some nice entries, I thought I'd try to jazz it up a bit more (OK so I'm compensating for my rubbish photoshop skills...but hey, its a rainy Saturday morning) and it did remind me somehow of Dali.

Daliesque and no doubt!  I like it!

Learned a few things from this thread and am glad of it, many thanks to all of you!