This is probably the longest I've ever spent on one photo from the planning stage through post editing. Since I'm on a DPL league my team kept offering suggestions to make the shot a little better and I was forced to go the extra mile on this one with edit after edit failing until I got it the way I thought I liked it best.
This shot is of my daughter and she had only been asked to serve as a test model for a photo shoot I had with a co-workers son the next day. I mostly focused on the marbles alone, swapping out different colors while my daughter got behind it for some background effect. When I got home and saw this shot it seemed nearly perfect. I tried to reshoot it with her but never got this look again. Some of the shots with the co-workers son turned out really well too and I agonized a while over which to go with but finally was persuaded by my DPL team that this was almost a "stolen moment" that was so special. I agreed despite the arguments that the marble was a bit too centered for most people's taste.
Post Processing:
1. Bumped up the yellow and red saturation a hair
2. Cloned out a distracting hotspot off center of the marble
3. Created duplicate layer
4. Unsharp masked new layer and then erased over the remaining hot spot to bring out softer original highlight
5. Created new hue/saturation layer and desaturated shot, masking out just the marble to reveal the bright original
6. Created new contrast layer and increased contrast masking out the marble to keep the original color/contrast in tact
7. Noise Ninja
8. Resize image
9. Noise Ninja again
10. Save for web
I have no idea how well this is going to score and I think this is going to be a heavy competition given the new leagues and judging by my team members submissions. If this does really well I'll post the original shot and some outtakes. If it doesn't score well I figure no one would care. LOL
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Place: 88 out of 556 Avg (all users): 5.9140 Avg (commenters): 7.1111 Avg (participants): 5.8072 Avg (non-participants): 6.2364 Views since voting: 1283 Views during voting: 331 Votes: 221 Comments: 10 Favorites: 0
The hard dark line around the marble makes it look as though it were pasted in. Not saying it was, that is just the impression it gives. Cool idea, though.
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