I love this gladiolus.  Such a cheery spring color.  With this photo I started by cropping and adjusting levels. ( Like always ) The original background was very distracting and I helped it by burning the background and doing a little cloning.   I then proceeded to process it with the help of Topaz Clean.  I hadn’t done much with this plug-in and I have found that it has a great deal of latitude when it comes to different looks and results.  If you like Topaz Simplify, try this plug-in.  It gives similar results with even more range in its possibilities.  I used a cartoon preset on this photo and then applied a spotlight in the Filter section of Photoshop Elements 10.  I lowered the opacity to tone it down.  At this point, I took the photo into OnOne Perfect Photo Suite 8 and used a preset that gave the composition a little more of a diffused glow.   I wanted a soft look on this one as opposed to a super sharp result.  No high pass filter on this one!! 🙂