Not so sure I like the fact that I can make myself look like the devil. The red color was present in the photo since the original, I just helped it along a bit with some contrast and brightness. Soft focus usually doesn't go over very well here, so we'll see if how this does. Hoping if anything to learn from this submission more than make a record breaking score.
Post Processing:
Cropping
Brightness/Contrast
Replace Color to get rid of some random white spots (from a dirty lens I suppose)
Selective Color
Brightness and Contrast again
Image Size
Save for Web
Statistics
Place: 283 out of 373 Avg (all users): 4.4570 Avg (commenters): 5.7000 Avg (participants): 4.3672 Avg (non-participants): 4.5230 Views since voting: 803 Views during voting: 435 Votes: 302 Comments: 12 Favorites: 0
Good solid black background and meest the challenge topic well.
There are a lot of setup images like this in the challenge so voters tend to get jaded on them after they have seen a lot of them. This especially true her because of the large number of entries. Yours will suffer scorewise because of that.
The lighting itself on your subject is good but the color appears oversaturated and the focus is to soft. The later is likely intentional but voters will interpret it as a sign of a poor quality image that you tried to save through post processing.
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