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The first decision was to shoot wide open. As I said, dusk was falling so I wanted to gather as much light as possible. Next was a dance between shutter speed and ISO setting. It happens that today's image was shot at 1/250th of a second at a sensor sensitivity (ISO) of 3200. Plenty fast enough to freeze any "action" in this image. Other shots at the event went as high as 1/1250 at 6400 (some things happened faster than Santa touching his finger to his lips). The image you see is pretty much what came out of the camera.
Finishing tweaks were done in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (LR) primarily using the Gradient Tool to bring up the detail in the beard and "fur" on the hat. There was plenty of detail in the whites that just needed to be brought out. Each side of the beard was given a little negative exposure, a little reduction of Highlights and a small amount of positive Clarity. Once that was done I right clicked on the Pin and chose Duplicate. Two things were done with the Duplicates. One was to leave the Duplicate right where it was and double the settings on that side of the beard. The second was to drag another Duplicate to the other side of the beard, turn it to match the angle and then Duplicate that. (Again to double the "impact" of the settings.)
Another Duplicate was moved, spun, applied to the fur of the hat and the image was finished. All that was left was a little Sharpening in the Detail Panel. Take a look at the enlargement of the image. Checkout the fine hairs in the beard and fur. Detail in the whites is the key to today's image.
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