First of all, yes, I know she was technically a princess mermaid… my title stands. OK, now that that’s out of the way I want to talk a little about the post processing that went into this photo. For this shot, there was a purple stage light creating an odd cast along the left side of Ariel changing the color of her skin and the color of her hair along the left part as well. To a lesser extent this affected Prince Eric’s face. I did a complete color correction of these affected areas, 15 layer adjustments in all. Additionally, the “sky” in the original was pure blue and Sebastian was looking off to the side. In a photo taken a few seconds prior to this one Sebastian was looking straight on and the sky had a more interesting color gradient but Ariel’s eyes were closed and she was looking away. I used this photo to mask in the better sky and Sebastian to create what I felt was the perfect capture moment for all aspects of the scene. Anyway, that’s a lot to say for a seemingly simple shot but I’ve found with Disney that sometimes the simplest shots are the ones I end up putting the most work into to make them stand out.
