Hi,
That’s my BG Christmas competition entry.
I’m beginning to see some of my mistakes, but I would love to hear your opinion, any criticism would be appreciated.
If I managed to do something well, I’m happy to share any process 
I worked on it for 15 days, the render time was 13 hours on CPU with 2500 samples.
That expression is perfect! the only thing I noticed was the foreground had to much depth of field but that might just be my personal preference
Yeah, it didn’t help either that I had to blur it even further in postproc because the DOF was too noisy. I thought I could get some nice bokeh, but it just never seems to look right anyway. Thanks for the feedback 
That looks pretty awesome to me, the only major flaw that I can see is that the lights appear too much like geometric primitives. Maybe you can hid the octagon look with a bit of post processing if that’s allowed according to the contest rules. Usually lights appear to have rays shooting off them in all directions sort of like in the following image. Adding these will hid the shape that is apparent with the lights in your scene.
What you’ve done here looks pretty close to being a screen shot from some big budget Hollywood film, I think it’s that good.
It is just me or does anyone else think the girl looks slightly like Darla from Finding Nemo?
Anyway, I really like the feel and story behind the image. Maybe you did it on purpose, but the living room light looks like it has been left on overnight? If I were you I would be tempted to try a version lit just by moonlight and the Christmas lights.
Thanks so much for responding!
@marc dion: That is a very nice reference image. I won’t try to salvage this picture, but I like bokeh effect too much to give up on it just yet, so I’ll be sure to use your advice in a future project!
I wanted it to look like a screenshot from an animated movie, yey, mission accomplished
@daniel97: I tried to check the girls from all animated movies I could think of but I completely forgot about her. I see what you mean, though The Despicable Me franchise was my favorite source of inspiration, the expressions and gestures are crazy good in those movies.
Yep, there is a table lamp behind the Christmas tree. I couldn’t really make it work without it. The Christmas tree as a main light source washed away the shadows on the face, because it’s effectively a big area lamp right in front of her. I needed a warm light source on the left that affected the girl alone, not Santa or the hallway, that way I have warm colors on cold. I also wanted to have three layers of brightness, dark background, bright middleground, somewhere-in-the-middle foreground, but I don’t think I pulled that off very well. Lighting is hard…
I like the idea and look of the scene but the kid looks a bit creepy with the bloated head. The eyes are bigger than my fists too… just some feedback
