Which Cross?

Well after a long time looking, I've got a decent female to make a first cross and see what I get (F1 HM x CT). She's a halfmoon, decent finnage by the looks of her, platinum body and fins but with red blotches - beautiful even colour - in dorsal, caudal and anal, and red streaking on both ventrals. There's also a hint of the same red on the gill plates so I hesitate to call her cambodian. She comes from a line that throws platinums, reds and red butterfly, and there may be some wilds (red/blue) in there as well. She is fairly big and about six months old, a bit older than I'd like, but by far the best choice there and beautifully marked.

Not sure which male to use. I have three good CT males that I was hoping to use for this. (I decided on using HM females and CT males because HM males are expensive, and I'd rather buy particular HM males to improve the strain rather than casting around wildly and spending a fortune early on.)

One is yellow, solid yellow all over. Double ray, outstanding finnage, but he's at least six months old and he's small. Not only is he not a good match colourwise but I don't think he could wrap her properly, he's just not big enough. So I've pretty much ruled him out for this particular cross.

Of my other two, I intend to condition both in case the first attempt fails. (On my last breeding attempt the first male I used refused to spawn properly and the female became eggbound and died before I could get another one to build a nest. I've had VERY bad luck breeding bettas!)
But I'm not sure which one I should focus on most. One is a butterfly. His base colour is a very bright shade of turquoise/blue, and the outer half of all his fins solid red. He's also got good finnage. The other has equally good finnage and is silver/steel blue with red streaks on his fins.

At the moment I'm leaning towards the butterfly but opinions from more experienced breeders would be appreciated. I'll try and put up some photos of all the fish later.

id actually use the yellow 2 ray, to amek a half sun you need to mix as many rays as possible , then try to breed back the best daughter to father mis match combo and the same with mom and son,,

what i mean is f1 is 2ray ct male to hm female

f2 is 2 ray dad to the female daughter who has the most hm spread while still haveing the slight combtail marks, longer is better
f2 is hm mom to son with the longest ray extenstions and most ray extentions possible, a 2 or more is best

f3 is a match form one of each f2 sets both shouls have the bigest spread possible and the most ray extentions as possible,, hopefully 3 or more at this point

depending on what the f4 babys look like you could try breeding the resulting fry back to a f2 generation parent, or uncle or aunt or whatever to try to display the best of both traits....
but it could get tricky cause resulting fry could be too tyoung to breed back to an older grandsomthing...

its easier starting with the best possible parents,, a ohm female with a 4 ray ct male was the eaisest combo to produce hs that i heard of ,, good luck!!!

Oh, darn, I forgot to mention that both of the other males are double rays as well... Roman (the silver) might be a quad ray but I wouldn't really call him a true quad... I'll have to get a flare pic and count the rays because he moves too fast. He's got some rays that split twice, but I don't think he's a true quad.

The female is big SD or HM. Her line throws HMs pretty reliably.

Should I use the male with the best spread then, since they are all DR?

yes as many as possible, it takes alot of cross breeding, it works realy well if u have 2 seperate lines goine that way when you get to f4 you can mate unrelated but similar line breeding,, baa but realy that would be likeat least 6 spawns and probaly take like a year and 3 months,, if you breed at 3 months,, loto work!

Well I figure I'm in a pretty good position to try, because I've got a bunch of pet shops that don't give a stuff about tail type and just want colour, which is pretty hard to get rid of in bettas. So if I end up with a heap of rejects, I have an instant offload market begging for them because their wholesalers are unreliable. I might even get enough to cover the costs of repeated spawns, although I doubt it.

I'll see if I can get some flare pics...

yup we want pictures

Here are the photos. Unfortunately, macro was being a... hmm, better not say that on a public forum... at any rate, it WOULD NOT FOCUS. Grrr. So the photos are kind of crap, but you can see their colours...
Now I'm leaning towards Roman, the silver/red, after having a more careful look at both fish. His finnage is of better quality, his rays are thicker and far more even, and he's also a quad. Not a strong quad, but even the rays that don't look split in these pictures actually are... they're hidden for some reason. He also has a greater spread than Shining, the butterfly.

Touched (the female) looks a bit different having settled in... with a reflective plastic container, it was extremely difficult to photograph a largely white fish even over a black background, especially since macro was being a... I won't go there. At any rate, her colours are not represented accurately. She is pinkish white in the body (like a classic bright red cambodian) and the colour in her fins is a pale red. The aqua is a slight iridescent hint of colour, not as dark as it appears. There's a nip from her anal fin (from when she was in a big tank with about 25 other mature females) but it's healing very well. She is definitely HM (eight ray) but you can't see it from the photos.

Touched/Roman looks like a good pair to me, they were in containers side by side for photos (strawberry punnets, rest assured those are not their tanks!!!) and even unconditioned were showing some interest. They are a good match in size and finnage and because of the red marbling on Roman's fins I'd be interested to see the colours resulting... what do you guys think?

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although i do love the bright colours of shining i agree with roman because of as you said he has much stronger cowning

i think you could get some marbling in the fry just with both the male and female having the red in their fins

goodluck!!!