Just One (On a Brush)by
freakin_hilariousComment by Artifacts: Positives:
Brave abstract and good choice of red (T-shirt lol!!) for a background. The sharpness of the main subject, the single hair, is very good. Vignette highlights the hair well.
Technicals:
This is probably an artifact of post processing but there is banding, most notable on the right side, in the "smooth" background that acts as a distraction. The object holding up the hair looks to be very, very slightly oversharpened in a couple places. Red might be a little oversaturated and the reflection off the 'object' is slightly overexposed.
The Challenge:
As is true of most every image, it meets the challenge and does so uniquely with a single hair. It is possible some voters expected hair to be more prominent and may have voted lower because of it. The banding in the red had a negative effect on voting. The 'object' balancing the hair is unidentifiable and though it is a tricky call in an abstract it is possible that voters wanted to know what it is and the fact it is unidentifiable acted as a distraction.
Suggestions:
Suggestions to reduce banding. In images captured in RAW do as much color processing and saturation in the RAW converter as possible and open the image in 16-bit mode in a high density color space like "Prophoto RGB". All this will preserve more color variations in color tones and reduce banding. In fact, that is one of the main reasons for taking in RAW in the first place, to preserve all that image detail possible. Color processing in your image editor will degrade your color tones and if you overdo it banding shows up. Don't change image to 8-bit and sRGB until just before you save for the web and your tones will be best preserved in your output file.
Also looks like your cloning may have left some artifacts in the smooth background on the right. The blur and healing tools are good for removing that.
Photographer found comment helpful.
