After saving the roated, sized and cropped, roughly color-corrected image in Photoshop’s native file format, I switched to Painter. You may have encountered people who were glad to assure you Painter is far superior to Photoshop, others who energetically argued the opposite. Although the programs do, indeed, overlap in functionality, they’re like apples and pecans: comparable, but so different comparisons quickly become absurd. If you can afford only one, buy both.
I chose a fairly fine texture, and used a large oil pastel to pick up colors from the wall behind the flowers and eradicate the bracketing shadows and other extraneous elements. I could have altered the vase’s and flowers’ blue shadows the same way, but decided to deal with that problem later. I saved the image under a new file name, then cloned it, filled it with white, and saved it under yet another file name.
I’ve found it’s more realistic to save a large number of successive iterations of a painting than hope my work will proceed smoothly and successfully from start to finish. Saving multiple iterations lets me back up and recommence work rather than start from the beginning again. Hard drive space, in the proverbial “nut shell,” is a great deal less expensive than wasted time.