Well, I finally broke down and downloaded the free trial of Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended. I think I'm in love with this program. I just hadn't realized how much better it really was than my old stand-by, the GIMP. I'd been wanting to do a project like this for a while; take a photograph of a rose, desaturate everything but the blossom and immediately surrounding greenery, and go from there. I just figured it would be a royal pain in the butt to painstakingly select out the rose itself. But I figured that it would help me get reacquainted with Photoshop, so I said to myself, "No time like the present, aye?" and found me a base picture* (which, yes, I took myself. Yay, no copyright worries!).

Man alive, it was a piece of cake! Couldn't have put more than an hour and a half into it, maybe two at the very most, and I took my time trying different things. I first selected everything but the rose and the few green stems/leaves around it, then black and white'd it. Then I inverted the selection, saved the selection so I could come back to it without having to reselect everything, and deselected the green bits, leaving only the blossom. I then tweaked the hue/saturation and the curves until I got the colors just where I wanted them. Then back to the saved selection, only to deselect the blossom this time, leaving just the green parts. After messing around with the curves again, to bring out a bit more green, I then duplicated the background layer, added a Gaussian blur, then set the layer's mode to darken to get the effect I wanted. From there it was as simple as adding text. Finished product:



The reason I told you all of this is so that I can some constructive criticism; if, for instance there was perhaps an easier method, let me know! I mainly did this project to get a better feel for the program again, but I'll be doing a lot more of this sort of thing in the future. If you have any tips or suggestions, pile 'em on! And, of course, I'd like any constructive criticism from an artistic standpoint as well. I'm well aware that this particular effect is overdone, but I'd never tried it myself. Anyway, enough of my chatter. Let me know what you think!

*
Spoiler for Base photograph: