Having a go at postprocessing again, help needed

Well spotted Martin

Me and my clumsy postprocessing which I am still learning the ropes.
But your idea about colourted backgrounds seem to make a lot of sense, would love to give it a try. tell me more about this please, how do I get some of those, and what exactly are they? Please remember I am a total newbie and sometimes the most basic stuff still is strange to me . But I do learn fast .
Are these something that I can just order and they are used as backgrounds when I want to shoot macro? They would come handy if there are things like that to make my life easy. At the moment I juggle with things that I pick up here and there and try to cover the backgrounds but then they all end up not being perfect and I have to then make more disastrous mistakes while posprocessing .


Stefan,

Thanks for those links about the noise reduction, I am very very keen on giving it a go. At the moment I am starting to grow a phobia about any iso setting that is more than 100 , so knowing that I can control it at a later stage if push comes to shove would be a really blessing .
From those two which one would you recommend?

Thanks to everyone for all your comments about the two shots. I really really appreciate your time and input, it all goes a long way in helping me improve my skills which at the moment are still at quite an early stage.
many thanks again

Amin

Coloured backgrounds are probably the cheapest and one of the most effective photographic accessories you can buy. You don't need anything fancy, just pop down to your local stationers / art supply shop and buy some large sheets of coloured paper - position them behind your subjects with blu-tac or clamps and you're good to go! Ten pounds should get you a couple of dozen of sheets of A3, if you're feeling really flush (and you want to take shots of larger subjects) then get some sheets of A1.

I use A1 sheets in black, white, dark blue, sky blue, dark green, light green, dark red, bright red, yellow, orange, mid brown and a couple of metallic sheets of card (gold and silver) which seems to pretty much cover all bases...

Yes you are right Martin and you will always have some loss if you do it in post processing.

Amin, you can also be creative with ligthing. I don't konw if there are standard bulbs but there are lights that give another colour. In the studio we have normall tungsten lamps but als daylight lamps. the tungsten are red and the daylight blue so if you use them together and get creative with your white balance you can get some nice effects.
Btw if you need some help with topaz let me know.

Amin... a background tip: keep them well back from the thing you are photographing so that you don't pick up the texture of the paper. That 100mm macro is as sharp as a tack!

One last thing: the tulip photo is lovely.

I think you can stop apologising for being a newbie now!

Best wishes, Kris.

Thank you all so much for all the tips. Off to the local stationary shop today .
And Stefan I am putting the Topaz to test now, seems to be pretty effective.

Oh Kris, thanks for the vote of confidence , that's really reassuring and helps me knowing I am making some progress, it has been quite a steep learning curve but one that I have been enjoying every minute of it and all your help has been absolutely wonderful.
Thanks

Amin