Pristine, Not So White

I have one lovely white iris that grows at work. This one managed to escape the freeze.
Shot with Canon 100m Macro, edited in Lightroom.
This was not how I had thought my final edit would be. So I'll walk you through what I did.
This was my first attempt.

After a few 'normal' adjustments, I lowered the saturation to zero in the basic panel (except for the 2 on the left). Even though the flower was white, there was still color in the images. On those two images I used the adjustment brush to desaturate all but the area I wanted left yellow. I really liked the whiteness of it, that's why the title is Pristine.
The collage was then created in the Print Module of Lightroom and exported as a jpg instead of printing.
Now into Photoshop: I duplicated my layer. With the magic wand tool I selected the white background, held down the option/alt key and clicked on the Adjustment Mask icon in the layers panel. This automatically puts the mask on the opposite of the selection. (I could have just deleted it....)
In Photoshop I tweaked the levels a touch and masked the image in the upper left corner because it was already dark enough.
I still wasn't happy with the way my black and white images looked. Too gray for my taste. So I added my favorite way to 'tint' a photo in Photoshop. This is an excellent way to get a more cohesive look to a group of images or just tint black and white images.
Layer>New Fill Layer>Solid Color. Change the blend mode to soft light and click ok.

Pick a light shade of your choosing. You can alway lower the opacity of this layer. Mine is 35% At any time you can double click the color thumbnail to change or tweak the color. I decided to play around and add a second color to mine. Love the touch of warmth it added.

I wanted a subtle background pattern, I clicked on my background layer and added an overlay from the Allyse Overlays kit, #3 and lowered the opacity to 25%.
My tint layer is also coloring my background. If you don't want this, clip the tint layer to the photo layer below. In this case I would need to merge my levels layer down first. Choose the levels layer, right click and choose merge down.
To clip the tint layer to the photo layer, you have several choices.
1. Hover your mouse between the 2 layers with the option/alt key held down, when the 2-colored circle (or square in CS6) with a down-facing arrow shows up, click.
2. Select the top layer,  Go to Layer> Create Clipping Mask
3. Shift/Command/G or that would be Shift/Control/G on a PC.
Another option is to mask it like we did the background copy layer.
I added the 'Pristine' title using the font, Sweetly Broken (Dafont) a favorite.
By the way, what's blooming in your garden?
Have a super blessed weekend!