Experimenting with Stylize Filters

I decided today to look at the filters under Stylize in Photoshop Elements.  I don't use them much and thought that I should have a go at seeing what I could do with them using blends.  I thought that I could establish a pattern of steps and apply it to every picture that I brought up.  But I should know by now that what works for one picture seldom works for another.

I thought flowers would be the best so I started with one photo.  Then I opened another and tried to apply the steps to it but ended up doing something completely different.  By the time I had finished 4 flowers I had done something completely different to each one of them and because I had to merge the layers together frequently to do the next step I couldn't remember in the end what I'd done.  Oh well, here are the before and afters:

I found using the Trace Contour strange.  When the window comes up it shows the coloured lines as really bold but when you have made your choice and closed the window the lines are much duller.  So I then tried to apply a hue/saturation adjustment to it and the same thing happened.  If you add a levels adjustment layer, there is no histogram.  It is only when I blended and merged it with the original layer that I seemed to be able to up the colour.  Here is one attempt:

This next picture I tried all sorts of things to up the colour and I also used a layer with the Solarize filter.  This was an interesting result and it reminded me of the old vintage postcards.  Wish I could work out how I finally got there...

Then I had a go with these wild flowers.  A mixture of blended solarize, trace contours and emboss layers with hue/saturation changes:

And my last attempt, using a mixture of the above with Find Edges:

Decided to add a flower to Flower Art Friday.