Edit:
Levels
Curves
Color Balance
Brightness/Contrast
Unsharp Mask
Hue/Saturation (Selective Desaturation of cyans & blues)
dup. layer
Layer Mask to get rid of greens in bkgrd
Add border
Save 4 Web
Statistics
Place: 497 out of 617 Avg (all users): 5.0654 Avg (commenters): 5.5714 Avg (participants): 5.0403 Avg (non-participants): 5.1724 Views since voting: 833 Views during voting: 202 Votes: 153 Comments: 8 Favorites: 0
Greetings from the Critique Club! Thanks for the opportunity to critique your image - I find I learn as much or more from doing this than I do from reading critiques of my own image!
Now, on to your shot:
Pros:
I like the subject, and the way you've abstracted a natural form. The shallow depth of field works (with cateats we'll mention in the next section) to isolate your subject from the background. Your selective desat is technically pretty good; whether it adds to the image is debatable for me (though I don't know what the background looked like before, of course). The backlighting of the fern is clearly the strongest point in the images favor; the color and luminance is great.
Cons:
Your biggest problem in this shot is the focus; the whole leaf seems a little off. Having the tip fade into out-of-focus would be ok, but it would need to be obviously deliberate.
I think the image would be improved if the leaf were on a diagonal, rather than up and down; that's one of those compositional rules that begs to be broken, but in this case I don't know that breaking it is doing you any favors. Also losing the tip of the fern is a problem.
Obviously the border bothers some people; I don't mind it and actually think you did it pretty tastefully, but I don't know that it adds much and borders are not loved in these parts so it likely hurt you score-wise.
Challenge
Normally I'd comment on how I think it fit the challenge, but that's silly for a free study!
Overall, this is a nice subject and a pretty good treatment, but a little more emphasis on technicals would have added a lot.
this selective desat actually works pretty well for this - but the image itself could use a little sharper focus - the leaf/set of leaves doesn't quite seem fully in focus except for the very top of the image.
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