Japanese Dragon Boat Festivalby
sabphotoComment by Artifacts: Positives:
Nice concept to use selective desat to make your main subject's traditional garb stand out even more from the other western clad people in the image. It makes for a nice photographic metaphor.
Technicals:
Good job with the selective desat(DQ?). The fact her leg is behind and between the legs of the girl in the foreground makes the desat an even stronger component of the image.
Unfortunately her face color is a bit over red. It is a touch oversharpened (like I usually do) which adds some digital artifacting to the image in borders with sharp contrast. Black and white tones are weak.
The Challenge:
Meets the challenge. Your only commenter hit the nail on the head when he said, "Good looking picture but i would have liked to have seen the boats". You have boat in the title, but no boats in the picture. This is one of the few images where the title could seriously downgrade the score. Your image looked to be heading strait toward middle scoring based on the beginning votes it got before DQ.
I'm guessing that creating the desat, which is the best part of this image, is what also what got it DQed.
Suggestions:
Correcting a red face is easy and basic challenge legal. Create a "Curves" adjustment layer, select the red channel then grab and drag the center down away from the word red. It will have a dramatic impact on face color with a very small adjustment but will slightly weaken all reds.
Tonality is the smooth transition between shades of grey in black and white images and shades of a single color in color images. The smoother the transition the better the tonality of the image. Your image does not have smooth greys. Reducing the contrast and/or changing the black and white points of the image might help. Subtle adjustments in a "selective color" adjustment layer in the blacks and greys can allow you to retain better tonality without making the image look flat.
A different title, like "Sagawa Festival", might have worked better if it had remained in the challenge.
Photographer found comment helpful.
