good day to all,

Im a new member of this community and would like to ask professional opinion on my first serious work retouching an image. I am no professional retoucher and just do it for pleasure.

I have an image which i think was a good enough material for practice.Listed below are the summary of the procedure I did to derive at the final image.

1. Duplicated the original layer
2. Adjusted the levels by determining first the darkest/lightest part of the image using threshold adjustments.
3. Dodging/Burning by creating dark/light curves adjustment layers and painting white over the mask.
4. After painting, I adjusted the red channel by adding 12% to get the skin look close to natural(I tried to!)

My objective here was to add drama to the original image, which apparently i find too flat, and added shadows and and highlights.

Please give me a professional honest opinion.

Thank you.

Tom

It's a bit hard to tell at that small size (I know, 100k isn't much). The first thing that caught my eye was the halo. I think I know what you were going for, and it might look better fullsized, but here it looks like you outlined her rather than have an actual background with depth.

Could be a bit magenta, too (again, hard to tell, and color on the web is problematic).

I am very sorry to tell you that I am NOT able to help you in this respect as your image is 2 small 2 "c" it's details.
If you upload it in a reasonable size, then it would be my pleaseure to write my comment.
Sorry

I like it. I think her skin tone is very nice. I would maybe color burn the pom poms just a bit to bring some of the details back. I think the background looks good as well.

I apologize for uploading a small size image, I am not allowed to upload images bigger than 100k. If you have suggestions where i can uploading bigger image files i would be more willing to to do so.

(About the halo) --> It was intentional on my part to put a gray halo on the image though a background that will show depth would really be nice. I would really want to do that but i think I still have to learn that part. How do you do that?

(too much magenta) --> That I think is a good observation because I didnt realize it until you told me. I appreciate that.

(Pompoms) --> Yes, I have to bring back the lost details. I was engrossed with the lady and failed to notice the details in the accessories. thanks.

Hello Tom
I believe you can post "two" individual images just under 100k each to demonstrate the before and after.
I agree with too much magenta (use hue and sat to correct) and the over blown highlights on the white costume (head piece as well).
One of the many ways to place a halo effect around the subject is to first knock out the image or a portion of it, layer a high feathered selection underneath (lasso tool using a 40 or more feather, depending on photo size) and fill the area with the color of choice (grey in this case).
The third layer under should be the color that you fade to (probably black or a dark color). Adjust the opacity of the selection layer acordingly. Of course there are many ways to achieve this result.

There are a few things I noticed about this picture when I pulled it up in photoshop.
First thing I noticed was in your retouch, you somehow eliminated the highlight in her eyes - which made her look very strange. Always preserve eye highlight or else the eyes look fake as if they've been drawn in.
Secondly in regards to the image seeming flat, I think it may be because the background and the foreground are fighting for attention in the original - that blue color simply needs to back off and the girl will pop out.
I noticed that everything is a bit bright, so backing off the highlights a little seems to help.
Also, try to avoid using high jpeg compressions because artifacting destroys your details - which in a smaller image like yours are vital.
Here's my 1 minute retouch.