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Hi all!

I'm no professional retoucher. I have been doing retouching for about 2 years now. I'm a guy who learnes by testing and exploring things. I work with Photoshop CS. I specifically chosed this project to see how advanced I have become and what I need to practise more on. This webcam-pic has a terrible quality (with purpuse). I tried to enhance it to it's optimal capacity. Tell me what you think of it? Appreciate it, really!

There are few things in some pixels that could be fixed, I know... But it was really hard to accomplish what I did.. Took me 1,5 day actually.

I have done lightes, colors, plastic surgery, make-up and a few more things.

The final picture was meant to look something like a cover on a cd album or alike.

Hi Dimtrij,

First of all, given the subject, overall its an 'ok' effort...

The first thing that i noticed is the Hair, you have over shaprened and as a result it has become pixelated.
You have done a good job with the skin, maybe just a little bit too much as the skin has no texture, but it is a webcam shot, so it's something to bear in mind for the future.
The edges needs softening as you can see the pixelation around the nostril, eye lashes and lips.
The background itself needs a little more attention, i would say bring the background to the edge of the subject as can still see the old background through the opacity.

I will post a sample of the possibilities, but i would like to see you clean up the image a little more, it is a very good base now for some more work.

Dont get disheartened by my comments, get inspired :)

Can't add anything to Axle's comments. Just keep in mind that often less is more.

Cheers
Dave

No no, i'm very happy about the critiques. Like I said, I took a crapy photo just for that cause. But honestly, how can one manipulate the skin texture? That is after skin-smooothing? I've tried a lot of stuff but those pores looks more like noise to me and I just refuse to have cracky skinspots.. Any tutorial or suggestions on manipulating/restorating skin texture?

Hi Dimtrij,

I hope you dont mind, but i wanted to show you that with a little time and patience, you will get what youwant, well hopefully anyways.

Like i stated previously, you have a good base image to work on, so i took that and the first thing i did was zoom up to 250% and with a small smugde brush, follow the contours of the hair, this will remove the pixalation and when you zoom back to 100% yo will see that there is an improvement in the hair. I proceeded to run over any pixelated area with a fine smudge brush, this helped remove sharp edges and restore some level of smoothness in the transition between background and subject.
A little work on the eyes and lashes, colour burned the eyebrows and further smoothing around the lips.

Although you had gone too far with the skin, i felt it looked good in the final composition.

This forum houses a wealth of experience and expertise and a little time spent browsing, reading and questioning will result in better work.

Your on the right tracks, but remember to pay attention to detail.

Hope this has helped.

Very nice work indeed :) Thx!

She could have done with a huge dose of Byro's declipping before I began but I didn't think of it until it was too late. Therefore, the more I played around with this picture, the worse it got until it screamed at me to do something else without making her look plastic and artificial. My solution was (after redoing the color entirely--sigh) to use the channel mixer on monotone and put a vignette of the main background color over the model to soften and blend.