Magnolia soulangiana (Saucer, Chinese or Japanese Magnolia)
is a late winter to early spring big blooming tree.

"Spring Fling I" was...

THE PROCESS

(for those who care to give it a try)

I guessed my way through this with PS CS. There is a step by step in the Scott Kelby book (PS Tricks). I highly recommend this book for unlimited fun.

I used a rectangular marque (set to 4 x 6 fixed ratio) to select the box portion. I then used the magnetic lasso (set to the "add to set position") to add the petals and the set to "subtract from set" to remove any voids (like the small space between the two left corner petals). I then copied that, opened a new white background image about 25% larger than the original and pasted what I copied to it from the original.

From there I selected the white BG as active, used the rect. marque (still fixed in the ratio) and dragged it around the box of the copied image (this keeps it behind the copied image allowing the petals to remain above it in the layers). Edit > Stroke (set to black, outside and 15 pixels in size).

I cropped it to 5x7 @ 300 dpi. Selected the "copied layer" as active and applied Layer Style > Drop shadow (75%, 45 degrees, 30, 10 ,30) to get the drop shadow on the BG.

I then flattened the layers, resized (1000 pixels on the long side) and saved it as a .jpg for Pbase.

I hope that is clearly described.

Scott