Maple Leaf

I'm spending quite a fair amount of time at the moment going through about 45 days worth of fall images, which I must admit most end up going bye bye. When I do have an image that seems good I usually do a quick general processing to see if I does indeed have possibilities of being a keeper.
This maple leaf was in my backyard a few weeks ago just lying on the grass. I liked how it stood out on the green by itself. So I took a picture, no big deal I know. This morning I was about to delete it because it's just a leaf laying on the grass, wasn't real sure what I would do with it, and besides most of the image is of grass, whoptedo! I decided to try to make the image of the leaf not the grass. So I selected the leaf with my little magic wand, inverted the selection and applied a Gaussian blur to the grass until it was simply a blurred background, took all of about 30 seconds to end up with this, I thought it was kinda cool. The part that struck me was the yellowish glow around the leaf that seemed to appear after the Gaussian blur was applied. Anyway just thought I would share that little bit of info and the picture of the leaf as well.

Came out pretty cool Brad. It almost glows.

The yellow glow is there because of the way Gaussian blur works - it grabs stuff from the surrounding area even if it's not selected. If you don't like the effect, there are ways to avoid it, but I like what it does here.

Way to think outside the box Brad. The gaussian blur had a nice effect as utilized here. And by the way, the selection worked very well here ... nice clean edges. Good work!

Works for me, Brad. Nice work with the processing. That is such a beautiful leaf, I think it deserves to be remembered. The background blur really puts the emphasis on it. Very nice!

Good idea Brad. This works well.

I've been experimenting with blurring the background on some shots of egrets flying. Unfortunately, I get the same halo effect when the bird is cut out and the background blurred using gaussian or lens blur in Photoshop. The effect is nice on a leaf as in your image. Very nice.

Any suggestions for how to get rid of the halo when blurring backgrounds?

Very nice - this is a technique that I'll have to try!

Tim!

What a great specimen! And a well executed shot of it. Nice work on the processing, too.

Nice shot Brad and thanks for sharing the photoshop stuff.

I like this a lot. I can see this as a greeting card image!