Artistic Direction (Patreon)

When you sit down to process an image the different directions you can take is almost infinite. How much or how little do you do? Colour processing, effects, replace the background or not, particles, light leaks, flares, dodging, burning, saturation? So many choices that will produce a different end result. 

I often use this image as an example, mainly because I couldn't decide what planet to put her on. The original image (below) was taken at Sydney OCC in 2016 with US guest cosplayer Miss Sinister in her Asajj Ventress was a Dathomirian female a character that appeared in The Clone Wars animated series.

That year the event was held at the temporary location of Glebe Island which as the name suggests in mostly surrounded by water and not much else so shoot locations were limited. So we went just outside to the ferry dock. The good news is it was very overcast and no direct sun, it was also blowing an absolute gale which turned out to be really good for the heavy cape but not so good for the lights. We ended up using one light with a softbox that was positioned quite low and we sandwiched a it between two people who were trying to stop it blowing away.

I try and leave the ground in tack and look for logical breaks between the real foreground and the fake background. The pier edge made it quite obvious in this shot meaning I could make it a landing platform on any Star Wars planet. The question was which!

In the end I went with Courassant but think Cloud City might have worked well, the bottom middle on is the original sky with the house just autofilled, this works well because it matches the light and colour temperature of the image, where with the others you need to match Miss Sinister to the temperature of the background. 

Is there a right answer, probably not. If I processed the image on another day it might have worked out very different. One day I’d like to revisit some of my favourite images and see what I would do different now.