I must have taken over 100 photos for this challenge before arriving at the one I would use. Macros are cool, but often hard to make exciting unless you use something with a lot of intricate detail or you have cool colors.
Subjects that I used which I didn't like the end results of enough for this challenge: Ear Bud, Drill Bit, Compass, Bic Lighter, Bottle Caps, and Resistors. The end results of many of those photos are worth keeping but I just didn't think they would do real well with the voters.
So I eventually arrived on doing a little microchip. I took dozens of photos of microchips with some having different arrangements, depths of filed, background colors, lighting, etc. This one, being simple yet interesting, stuck out to me. I then used Topaz Adjust 5 to give it some extra color, which I think helps improve the image significantly (before there was a lot of black and grey).
Lighting for this was done with two lights. There was a LED ring light on the lens, and a flash in an umbrella. The umbrella was camera left, pointing down on the chip, and I was shooting through the umbrella.
Post Processing:
* Crop
* Increase recovery and black point
* Increase saturation with -100% vibrancy
* Topaz Adjust 5
* Topaz DeNoise
* White balance
* Increase exposure and recovery
* Decrease brightness
* Increase definition
* Export as TIFF
* Resize
* Sharpen Edges
* Save as JPEG
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