Picture Retouching for a friends portfolio

[biskit27]

Hi! This is my first post here.

I've been using photoshop for a while, but mostly learned on my own, I used to model, and photographs and such have always fascinated me, so I just kind of got into photoshop, I started right off with retouching and such, and I'm starting to expand more, including reading everything I can on the subject, and maybe asking some of my friends who do it for a living to kind of point me in right directions, but I have done a lot of retouching for friend portfolios and I did these 2 weeks ago, and I just thought it'd be awesome to get some critique,

I should have probably fixed the hair, um, i didnt, lol, the blur is from the actual picture, i guess there was wind, I didnt smudge or blur for the skin, I mostly cloned it at a low opacity large brush, because of the natural light, and how close it is, i didnt want to get rid of too much of the texture of her skin. For some reason she didnt want me to do anything with the lashes so I didnt, I just recently calibrated my screen so I realize the slight redish hue on part of the neck, and its meant for a medium sized print. Id love your guys' opinions.


thanX!
Jayce

[biskit27]

er, I just noticed the wierd highlight on the forehead, arg, I should have calibrated my moniter sooner, lol

[Kraellin]

hi jayce,

welcome to RP

mostly in your image you've over-cloned. that's what gives that somewhat pasty look. too much depth and texture gets removed. it's a common mistake. practice gets it better.

the other thing is color balance. she's lacking good color, missing some red. so, it's not all clone that is giving her a bit of a pale look.

you did a nice job of blemish removal. but, you also removed what looked to be some small moles. generally, those are left in unless requested to be removed. a mole isnt a pimple. it's a feature. it's always there. leave it in.

now, i took the liberty to have a bit of fun with this picture. she's a great looking woman and i wanted to bring that out even more. so, forgive me if i overstep my boundaries here. i'm not trying to one-up you here. i just liked the image.

craig

[biskit27]

no not at all, i love seeing what others do with the same pic, fun, lol

um, i purposely left her with a sort of greyish complexion, um, just something about the picture, the angle and such, probably reminded me of something subconciously, lol, i cant think of what it is, yeah, she wanted me to remove all the moles,

the over cloned your reffering to, is it really most obvious on the forehead? what do u think the best way would be for me to bring back some of the texture, with a mask? or heal or??

thanX

[SteveB2005]

Hello Jayce. My 2$ comment. One thing I noticed was of course the eyes which is what I always look at in a portrait. The horizontal catchlights are distracting. Usually catchlights are positioned at 11 or 1 o'clock, depending on where the light is positioned. There is a nice tutorial on doing eyes somewhere on the board here I read and I apply that advice to my own work. If you can, try to avoid a mannequin type look and pay insight to skin texture if possible. You did well on the blemish removal however. You also made an improvement on the original that had some neat stuff. Keep practicing like we all have to do. regards steveb

[biskit27]

thanx for the input, ill def look for that tutorial

[Kraellin]

biskit,

the over-cloning is somewhat throughout, at least to my eye. but yes, the lighter areas will show it up more. the image is already a bit pale, so any over-cloning will show up even more than normal. in other words, less is better here. so, the forehead, the ridge of her nose, the cheeks somewhat and so on. i'm attaching an early stage of my earlier picture to show a more or less minimal cloning/cleanup. it may surprise me too because in looking at your retouched image again today, it doesnt look as bad to me as it did yesterday. you been sneaking some changes in on me? all i did was remove the blemishes, retouch around the eyes a bit and left the moles (though, you said she asked to remove them, which is fine).

craig

[Kraellin]

if you open both attachments and put them over each other and just click back and forth to bring one, then the other to the front, you'll see somewhat what i mean about the pasty look.

also, my version didnt do much with the darkness under the eyes and could be done better. they are still a bit dark here. but you want to leave some. otherwise the image will look too flat.

as for bringing back some of the texture, the best way is to not take it out to begin with ok, that was obvious, wasnt it? one way to bring it back is to mask the areas you dont want to change and then add noise at a low setting and then blur the noise a tiny bit. do this on a separate layer and then set that layer to luminance, soft light or any other that will bring that blurred noise to the layers below. in paint shop pro 10 i simply hit the 'edit selection' button and paint in white. this is one way to make a mask. however, i then hit the 'edit selection' again and it turns the mask into a selection and simply add the noise to the selection, blur it, and de-select. i can do this on the original layer when making the mask/selection and once it is in the selection mode, i can make a new raster layer and apply the noise/blur there because the selection will float to whichever layer is highlighted in the layer palette. when i de-select the noise is applied to the new raster layer. quite handy at times. i dont know if photoshop will float the selections like that or not, so you may have to play around a bit.

i shld also mention that you actually did a pretty good job of it. you shld see some of my earlier works in cloning. they look like i covered the poor people in flour or something

craig