Feed back please

[neil]

Hi This is my first post here so i hope i get it submited ok ?
I took this photo at home of a friend using a set of studio flashes and a Nikon D70 in raw format. But as you will see the image needed alot of work doing to it. So i have suplied the origional & edited versions. So critique please, how can i improve this image ? Many thanks for your help

Neil (newbie)
origional
http://www.e-wins.co.uk/orig.htm
edited
http://www.e-wins.co.uk/port6.htm

[Caitlin]

Hi Neil - quite a challenging photo there.

Some of this is very much personal taste, but this is what I did:

Tidied up her stray hair, and darkened her part, brightened eyes, removed fold line on neck, revealed edge of mouth by dodging, and added a bit of colour saturation to the lips. As it looks like you are after a border, I just threw this one on - probably not the best (I'm new to that side of things).

[neil]

Hi Caitlin

I like what you did, once you see some one elses retouching it seems obvious, "of course i should have done that". The removal of the neck line and extension of th lip add a fuller picture. I thought about removing some of the stray hairs but that seemed a little daunting. did you clone those out or spray them out ? Excellent web site by the way i like the full screen slide show i think i need to work on somthing like that for my web site. Also incredibly impresed with the way you mannaged to re-create the top of the womans head it is seamless. WOW!

Thanks for your help

Neil

[Caitlin]

Hi Neil, thanks for the complements! That 'head restore' was the first time I posted to Retouch Pro seeking advice - so see where it can get you!!

The hair was simply the clone tool, cloning the background over the edge of the hair. You can use a fairly small hard brush at the end to clean up the edge.

Welcome to Retouch Pro BTW!