LightningPaul

Shot at a ice sculpture festival. It's a lovely Ice Queen, ready to defend her territory all time. We were lucky to visit this place because it supposed to be over. It was freezing hard outside so they extended the festival and the income price was 20% lower.
The last day of the official opening period (so just before extending) a big group of blind people were invited to see and feel the ice sculptures. Unfortunately all figures got a bit damaged.


TECH-INFO: taken with my Minolta F100. The 35mm equivalence of the focal length is 50mm.
I did pretty a lot to improve this image. It was a simple JPG which was a bit underexposed. The sky background was rather dark and and filled with Christmas trees at the bottom part. I made . Using the quick selection, magic wand and gradient tools, and by carefully combining the selections I was able to make several masks and adjustment layers to improve the picture.
The lower part of the background is darkened a lot and some parts were removed using the clone tool. The upper part is made much brighter using an aggressive curve. You may see lots of banding in the histogram but I like the space looking decoration too much.
The body and the horns are also processed separately. They both got a global brightening and contrast adjustment though with different settings of course. The white body part got a bit more depth by dodging certain parts. Unfortunately her nose got mostly destroyed probably because of the special touch and feel visit for blind people. So I really tried to reconstruct it using the clone stamp. Since I'm a software engineer and not a plastic surgeon it was pretty hard and the result is not perfect, though much better than before. Also her mouth was damaged but I decided that it is good enough. Finally I removed a few small but annoying highlights of her body.
It was lots of work but I'm very satisfied with the image. When looking at the image you should have almost the same experience as I had over there, at least I hope :-)