Took this on a dreary afternoon in the hopes that I could somehow turn the stump into a fairy castle (as I used to pretend in childhood). Not sure I did that very well, but tried to add a dreamy 3D quality to the background and really bring out the detail of the stump and surroundings (like from a storybook).
Post-processing included:
Cropped, used multiple selective layers to achieve dreamlike quality and depth of detail.
Selective increase of color saturation, curves adjustments, decrease of background lighting, contrast adjustments,lighting source adjustments, gaussian blur to background layers, and a tiny bit of blending brush.
Resized for Web (to a much smaller size that I wanted, but was too big at 640).
Statistics
Place: 84 out of 151 Avg (all users): 5.2203 Avg (commenters): 6.6000 Avg (participants): 5.0833 Avg (non-participants): 5.3007 Views since voting: 1268 Views during voting: 375 Votes: 227 Comments: 8 Favorites: 0
A very dreamy shot. The ever so slight blow-out in the fork of the tree clinches this shot, defines the dreaminess. If the tree stump were any sharper it may have damaged the illusion, but it's great - the amount of detail to look at in this is great and despite this doesn't seem cluttered at all.
Good attempt at creating a fantasy world. The use of softness in the background is a good idea. Colors are fine, particularly the surrealistic look of the background tree trunk.
Some viewers will not buy into the world as you've created it and will vote it lower.
Technically, there are a couple things that hurt the image. There is a high amount of detail in the main focal point and it does not come across as sharply focused. It is very difficult to get fine detail like that correct in digital images. It also has a couple of hot spots on the lower left of the side of the main subject that should be corrected.
You might try some burning to both mute the oversharpened granulated appearance and remove the hot spots. 10% darkening of the near trunk and foreground will also soften the image and bring out more detail with better tonal transitions.
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