I must admit that the expert editing ruleset nearly scared me way from this challenge. If I didn't work at a place with a lot pf cool stuff, I very likely would not have entered.
On the first day of this challenge i remembered this robot bust in the learning center. After getting some shots, I thought about what I could do with the expert ruleset to enhance the photo. That's when I thought about textures, and adding a circuit board to the background of the image.
So I downloaded a clip art image, and added it with soft light and low opacity, but I wasn't sure if this was legit. So I contacted the site council, and asked about my procedure. Turns out they consider this a photo composition, so the circuit board also needs to be taken during the time frame. Just for clarification purposes, I asked about taking a photo of the clip art. Apparently this falls under the "photo of a photo" rule, so that wasn't allowed either. I was down to finding a circuit board to photograph. After a lot of searching (a few hours in different places) I found one on the bottom of an older hard drive that had a pattern I liked.
In the end, I'm very fond of this photo. I'm not really certain how well it will do, but I hope others find the robot as interesting as I, and send some high votes my way.
Post Processing:
* Robot Photo
** Straighten
** Crop
** Decrease black point
** Increase brightness
** Increase contrast
** Increase saturation
** Lighten shadows
** Topaz Adjust 5
** Export as TIFF
* Circuit photo
** Straighten
** White Balance
** Increase black point
** Increase Definition
** Export as TIFF
* Combine images in Pixelmator
** Circuit board layer
*** Gaussian blur of 5px to separate background from foreground
*** Mask out robot
*** Soft light blending mode
*** Opacity 29%
** Export as TIFF
* Combined image
** Resize
** Sharpen Edges
** Save as JPEG
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Wow, my first top 10 since July. Feels good. Thanks for all the kind votes and comments.
Statistics
Place: 8 out of 41 Avg (all users): 6.2366 Avg (commenters): 8.2500 Avg (participants): 6.2174 Avg (non-participants): 6.2407 Views since voting: 1799 Views during voting: 369 Votes: 131 Comments: 5 Favorites: 0
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