[White Elf Style Cosplay Post-production] Tried Tuning a Dreamy Vibe Myself

I recently shot these convention photos for this White Elf look, and the raw images actually had rather messy lighting with quite a few passersby in the background. So, the first step of the post-production was to remove those distracting elements and pull the visual focus back to the character itself. I used MTXX for basic skin brightening and background blur to make the frame look cleaner and softer, then imported it into Huashijie to manually draw those delicate starburst effects and a few strands of purple light. To be honest, I rarely do such high-intensity VFX compositing because blending images is truly not my forte. Just to make the glow of the effects and the edges of the character blend naturally, I repeatedly adjusted the layer blending modes multiple times, and finally used Multiply plus Soft Light to barely achieve the desired effect. Huashijie has a rich selection of brushes, but placing the effects in the right position along the perspective of the character's movement is still quite a test of spatial sense.

I specially posted this today to take on some free requests, purely wanting to practice with different raw photos and see if my style of Cosplay post-production can adapt to various types of images. Every photo has a different base, so the color grading approach changes accordingly. For example, with this color scheme of a white dress with purple trim, I didn't chase after intense colors but lowered the saturation and preserved the texture of the white fabric, steering the overall tone towards a cool, dreamy style. The random scattering of effects actually depends on my mood—sometimes if I feel a spot is empty, I'll casually add a star, which conversely gives a more natural and spontaneous feel. Although processing free photos takes a lot of time, every edit allows me to figure out some new tricks. For instance, this time I learned how to use the brush tool for localized highlight blooming, and the effect turned out unexpectedly more layered than directly adding a filter. I hope to come across some interesting raw images so we can collaborate and spark even better results.