Toothless - Piece Breakdown

I thought it might be fun to show my process for editing my latest photo. I recently got a new camera, a Sony A77, which is a BEAST of a camera. Something that I've always found fascinating is macro photography of toys and action figures. I love it when the photographer uses them as if they were real life models and tells a story with the piece. As you know I'm a huge fan of How to Train Your Dragon, so I decided to do a macro photo of my Toothless figurine. Here is the original photo straight out of the camera.

It's not too bad of a photo, but I know that I could do so much more with it. Here's what I did:

The first thing I did was recompose the shot to match with the rule of thirds.

Next I did some cleanup to the background, getting rid of some stray pieces of grass.

Since I wanted Toothless to be the focus of the image, I sharpened him up a bit.

This step is probably really subtle, but I added some dust by the light source to add a bit of atmosphere to the piece.

While I had some really nice background defocus going on, I wanted to add a bit of bokeh as well.

Now that I had most of the touchups done, I did some basic color correction to make the greens really pop.

Something I did on this piece, since I was trying to tell a story, was add some widescreen bars to make it feel a bit more cinematic.

I also added a vignette to add to the cinematic feeling a bit. Plus I really like vignettes haha

And here's the final image! I added a lens flare to the image, whichI think really pulled it all together!

Well there ya go! Just a quick little look into how I edited this piece. Hopefully you guys like the finished product as much as I do.

Thanks for stopping by and as always enjoy!

~Josh