I removed some of the distractions in the background, but tried to retain the texture as I really liked it. Also cropped some of the leaves.

The picture reminded me of an old flower photo, so decided to desaturate the colours , desaturated the green a bit more, and then upped the yellow slightly.

Made a new layer with a fibrous texture and light blur, set the opacity at about 30, and picked out the main flower with the eraser, and then merged layers, then added a vignette to finish the Vintage feel.

And mine

Removed the half stem on the left and the dead petals.
Added some canvas on the left to give the left hand bud some room.
Removed blemishes and dirt on leaves and blooms and repaired as needed.
Darkened the whole thing to loose the blemishes on the background.
Lightened the flowers and semi light the leaves.
Very gentle sharpen to luminosity only.

This is my effort......a little rushed towards the end but I thought I had better post now! Was fun but harder to achieve the look that I wanted.
In lay mans terms, I cropped, slightly lightened the background, changed the colour of the flowers to a more vivid colur and slightly sharpened

I am cheating here having a secong shot
This time cropped to one flower, adjusted the colour, erased some of the overlaping petals and made it look a bit more like a painting.

Come on Bob, what is the next project!!

It really is interesting the different approach people have on editing. Did the rest of you who did an edit find it difficult doing someone else's work? I did, think when you take a shot you already know what you want the finished image to look like and you work toward it but when it is someone else's work you are not at all sure how to start.

OK in this case it needed tiding up but even then we all had different ideas as to how much and what, and then we all let rip on the background and light.

Interesting exercise and yes, lets have another.

Well here's my effort.



Steve

Steve, personally I like what you've done the best. I love the colors, the crop and what you've done with the background. Bravo!

Steve perhaps you will let us know what you did, thanks.

Help!!!! I am not the most linear of workers in PS, in fact it could be said I use the scatter gun technique. I try it and if it does not work I step backwards and try something different. I will however try to give yo a taste of what I did.

Copied the image and pasted it into a new document in CS4 (16 bit, ProPhoto RGB).

First I cloned out the stalk protruding out in the lower left of the image.

I then got rid of the vertical blemish running up the left side with the patch tool and the clone tool.

Using the healing brush, I "healed" the blemishes in the background.

Created a a new copy layer, selected the background using the magic wand and lasso. The I used the "Colour Replacement" tool to change the look of the background. Using the same selection I used "Surface Blur" tool to change the texture of the background.

Inversing the selection, I used the "vibrance" an "saturation" tools to boost the yellows, greens and colours of the flowers.

"Smart Sharpen" as needed.

Changed colour profile to sRGB and the bits to 8.

Saved for Web.

There are probably steps that I experimented with but then backtracked via history because I did not like look that resulted.

It took about 15 minutes in total ( about as long as I can sit with my bad back at the moment) and looking at the image now I am sure with more time I could have done better.

Steve

Thanks Steve it is a help to know how people go about their work and what tools they use.