Due to Christmas taking up 4 solid days for me (lots of ugly travel), I didn't have a ton of time for this challenge. So I sifted trough some of my LEGOs and found this knight and dragon. A bit later I found this mountain/river base piece, and then some brush and trees for the background.
Then came the composition. At first I had the characters much closer to the backgorund, and I was looking a bit down on them. That didn't have what I really wanted, so I brought them to a small mountain on the other side of the base, and got some nice backgorund separation and a more even level of sight.
Then the lighting. I have a new umbrella for Chisrtmas, so I wanted to play with that. This isn't the best thing for a 43" umbrella, as it casts a pretty wide area of light. So I brought the umbrella down to maybe about 18", and that gave more of a focused beam. The umbrella was camera left. I also used a bare flash with low power from camera right/behind to open up some shadows. There are CTO gels on each, as I wantedto give the impression of sunset or firey souroundings.
Post Processing:
* Increase exposure and recovery
* Increase brightness
* Increase definition of the dragon head
* Increase contrast
* Increase saturation and vibrancy
* Topaz DeNoise
* Topaz Lens Effects for a nice gradient of color
* White Balance
* Clone a dark part out of the dragon head caused by a misplaced shadow
* Increase recovery
* Increase black point
* Increase brightness
* Increase definition of the dragon head
* S-curve
* Levels to brighten the flame
* Red and orange saturation and luminance adjustments
* Desaturate and increase luminance of red in sword, armor, and shield (brings back to "shiny" grey)
* Edge Sharpen
* Export as TIFF
* Resize
* Sharpen Edges
* Save as JPEG
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