This soft focus stuff is hard! I tried a few through gel on glass, a few with very shallow DOF, and a few with both. I ended up liking very shallow DOF best with just a touch of gel. Post - auto levels, fade, increase saturation by 8%. And, LOL, a bit of USM to pop the small area in the center that's in focus.
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Place: 35 out of 191 Avg (all users): 5.9297 Avg (commenters): 7.3333 Avg (participants): 5.7639 Avg (non-participants): 6.0354 Views since voting: 1083 Views during voting: 260 Votes: 185 Comments: 12 Favorites: 0
You did a really great job here - nice gradual movement from sorta-sharp to smoothly blurred. I really like how all three give us a different point of view - straight on, partial profile and full profile!
I think your experiments worked out well and you hit on the secret to this challenge, which was judged a bit more as very shallow DOF rather than overall softness. You managed to combine both quite nicely!
Cat - I really thought this was very good -the composition and lines were really solid - gave it a 7. I think you probably got robbed from those that saw the sharp focus flower dead center...
Very nice composition, the green is very uniform and pleasing and the flower looks like a swimmer diving into the pool ( some imagination working overtime!! lol)
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