...which reminds me: taz, you did some brilliant flower photos a while back using some sort of (digital?) filter to enhance the colors. How did you do it?

You could do it by adjusting Curves and Hues, shane. The cape is an add on, as I'm sure you know. Also looks like they sucked in her tummy and increased her cup size ;)

If they were the flowers from my balcony, which I think they were, since I don't usually do flower shots, I didn't actually enhance the color at all. I did do a sort of digital vaseline effect around the focus area, simply by using a blur filter (probably Gaussian blur) and then using the history brush to bring back focus to the central area (by getting rid of the blur).

taz, that's all? You just blurred the background to bring the flowers more into foreground focus and also add depth to the photo?

Yep, looks like lots (and lots, and still more lots) of fairly easy photoshoppery.

Yes, as it remember it. I'd have to look at them again, but I'm pretty sure that's it.

Also, on the Ask photo, ico, you're going to giggle when you see this - they also got rid of the ... erm ... dark area under her armpit. I'm giggling right now.

The sucked-in belly part is easy. I don't know how they did the boobs, really. I could probably manage something (less good) if I played around a while, but it seems like it's mostly painted in - I don't know.

But I bet doctor_negative does.

*pheeew*

I need to get better with curves and hues. And especially the PhotoShop adjustment where you pull up the actual graph of color values and adjust accordingly.

I have a PhotoShop book out of the library now, but I guess I was hoping people would take this as a challenge, a learning experience, and a tutorial for others.

The variety of answers is great. I have a feeling there was some actual "painting" (with low opacity) done to enhance colors as well as use of filters and digital adjustments. And of course many areas are added in, like her cape, but even that seems made of multiple layers or multiple "glazes" of low opacity paint to get the intense color.

Anyway, it's great to read all the answers here and on AskMe. Thanks.

Well, I think a tutorial here would take pages and pages. And pages. I did a few really limited tutorials on some aspects of the repeating patterns I used to make, and it was a lot of work... and those were really simple processes.

So people are going to be pointing you towards what tools to use, etc., but even only in writing, with no reference images (which become important), it would be hours of work to create even a sketchy step-by-step.

Thanks for all the answers, folks. The tips on saturation and such are usable for me, and I figured we'd get a few more professional, complicated explanations that are really interesting.