On February 27, 2005, I set up my tripod in my kitchen and layed out some of my daughter's PrismaColor pencils on a piece of white mat board and used the light coming in from the window. I was going to enter the "Light on White" Challenge. At the time, I was quite proud of the shot. It was my 7th entry here at DPC. It scored a 4.9938 and finished 222nd out of 427 entries. I was actually disappointed by the score. How could the voters not see what a wonderful shot this was?
Well, fast-forward 33 months and 45 challenges later, and I now see it wasn't such a wonderful shot. The background was gray, there were nasty shadows, you can see the texture of the mat board, and well, it wasn't really light.
I missed Light on White II, so when Light on White III came around, I figured I would try again.
This time, I used some lighter colored pencils, some really white core board, and two 1000 watt lights through umbrellas at 45 degree angles to kill the shadows. I used skills that I have learned in Photoshop over the last year and nine months. So I sure hope that this scores better than a 4.9938 and finishes better than the 48th percentile. If it doesn't, I might just quit trying.
Converted from RAW
Crop
Resize
Levels for white point
Lower Saturation -22
Increase Brightness +10
Cloned out a few spots
Noise Ninja
USM (300, .3, 0)
Statistics
Place: 100 out of 233 Avg (all users): 5.5291 Avg (commenters): 7.6667 Avg (participants): 5.3187 Avg (non-participants): 5.7245 Views since voting: 816 Views during voting: 267 Votes: 189 Comments: 4 Favorites: 0
Very nice. It's good to see a disorganized grouping of pencils :) When first looking at this I thought, but it would be nice if the pencils were all sharp and maybe turned the same way (no lettering). Then I thought, no, this is much more natural. Technically excellent (the whites and the soft colours and hinted shadows). ~8
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