Hello,

I am a newbie in retouching, and sorry - my english is very bad.
This is my first portrait retouching. What do you think?

lasc

I think you did a good job, but to me, the skin looks a little bit flat in terms of highlights, and a bit fake with the extreme smoothing. I would try and bring back some of the original texture to her skin, either by fading out your smoothing layer, or some other way.

Very nice start. The skin texture is probably the hardest part of retouching. I think your retouched version also has a red cast. I don't know if this was intentional or not.

I only do this as a hobby so my version looks good to me but may not be up to professional standards. Changes were
- duplicated background layer with overlay blending mode (25% opacity)
- degrunge skin with opacity of 30%
- burn tool for eyebrows
- dodge tool to bring out highlight in hair
- increased saturation of lip color (red channel only)
- brightened teeth
- lightened whites of eyes
- increased saturation of green part of eyes.

Iasc

For a first time retouch I think you did very well. I agree with Dropbear in that it looks a little too blurred. Shel has almost perfect skin and there is no need to do any blurring on it at all. The healing brush or clone tool should suffice for this one. But if you are using a blur of some sort then take down the opacity of that layer to bring back some of the texture into the skin. I had a quick go at this one just to give you a different angle on it. It helps to have a lot of versions because that way you can pick the parts you like from each one and construct your own. The model is damn near perfect and hardly required any retouching at all. All that I did, apart from removing a few blemishes, was straighten that skew tooth, fix up the eyebrow and adjust the levels.

Syd

One thing kept leading to another so I couldn't remember the steps if I wanted to. I can say that I removed the blemishes using and edge detect on the Top layer set to divide (a GIMP thing). :)

I tried togive it a glamour retouch without losing the detail in the face. I wanted to keep the cute freckles!

lasc, it's very good for a first retouch!
The only thing that bothers me is that you've lost all detail around the eyes, and that the skin is too blurry, as someone already mentioned.

I think you should pump up the contrast and lighten the reds a bit. Here is my try:

Pumped up the colors, smoothed out the skin but left the freckles..there cute.
Lasa