whadaya got for me....

[mchawkes]

Experimenting a little with this one. Just looking for oppinions or critiques. Be honest! To soft? overworked? any advice or suggestions? The original looked very harsh, cold, and rigid to me, but I liked the pose, so I tried to soften the transitions and bring more detail into the 1/4 tones of the flesh, as well as warmup the shot overall (hence the new bkgd).

[mchawkes]

Heres the rest of them... Try to ignore the jpeg artifacting.. this 100k file size max is killing me!!

[manta1900]

I just did:
Auto White Balance
Lighting/Contrast
and Sharpening
(using my filters)

[tlooknbill]

New to here and thought I'ld dive in and offer some comments and suggestions. Not too experienced with fashion style touchup. Mainly do family photo stuff.

mchawkes, that's an excellent rendition, but I get a kind of CGI super clean smooth feel from it. I don't know if that was your intent or what the standards are for fashion model retouch or how perfect you have to get. I can only speak from my own experience working on family photos. I never use the airbrush tool.

I gave a crack at it being my first attempt at tackling a fashion style touchup. I used curves extensively to create a perfect grayscale rendition and to reduce grain on each RGB channel while having a New Window open in composite view to watch for color crossovers. There is slight residue in the image around the knee and collarbone area.

http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?pi...9LbdrLvf59f9ji

Afterward, on each channel:
Apply despeckle, Fade Despeckle 50%-to reduce film grain.
Apply Sharpen filter, Fade Sharpen 50%.

Apply S-curve to composite with a straight leg angled drop off starting just below 128 position.

Touched up using blur tool set to 50% strength.
Sharpen tool set to Luminosity at 25% strength.

Apply +13 saturation only on the reds by sampling the sweater with the eyedropper in Hue/Saturation.

Worked in sRGB. Took me about 45 minutes of fiddling around.

Question: Are there copyright issues with pulling images pro/amatuer off the web to use as examples for retouching? It's hard to find good pro images like the one in this thread to practice on and use to demonstate retouch skills.

[oltenius]

machawkes, I like what you did, good job!
Maby, the last have too much skin noise.
Regards

[KR1156]

what's up mchawkes.......did you make her right eye a lighter blue then her left to help illustrate the heavy light falling on her right side?

[mchawkes]

Originally Posted by tlooknbill

I get a kind of CGI super clean smooth feel from it. I don't know if that was your intent or what the standards are for fashion model retouch or how perfect you have to get. I can only speak from my own experience working on family photos.

this is a fashion beauty retouch.. but I worked it quite a but, and was concerned it might have gone too far. I agree about the airtbrush thing.. I totally stay away from that. And I definetly would not take it this far in a different "lifestyle" type retouch. Im digging the advice and techniques... keep it coming!

[recrisp]

I don't know if this link will work, but I wasn't about to post a small image after working on it... heheh

I used the large head shot for the hair, and opened up the highlights.
The eyes came from the same thing, and I opened them slightly too.
The make-up I smudged, and rearranged slightly, and opened up 'her' left cheek.

I smudged the skin slightly, just wiggling it enough to get rid of the grain.
I color-corrected the skin to be more neutral, and toned down the reddish edges in the skin's shadows.

The sweater looked pretty good in a charcoal, so I went with that, and also destaurated the background to help match, and that's when I decided to changed her eye make-up to a grayish color to co-ordinate.

The bra and panties I used Shadow/Highlight to open that area up...

The highlights on her skin were too much for me, so I painted them and reduced the opacity to help decrease glare.
(Multiply and saturation)
I did a few curves here and there, and some levels too.

Adding a slight amount of color to her lips, and I think that's about it...

Randy

http://4dw.net/crisp/lady2.jpg

[KR1156]

Here's my try at skin smoothing only, didint do anything else. color may be off(+red). It's kinda hard to do with a small image too.

-Also, was curious mchawkes, if you wre applying a curves layer to darken the overall image, and masking back the highlight to make them pop more? To me that technique gives it a bit of an artistic edge.

[tlooknbill]

I accidently picked up a new technique messing with this image. Applying a reverse s-curve to an image layer set to overlay or any blend mode that makes an image appear like mchawkes' contrasty/oversaturated "before" sample produces that odd desaturated look seen in movies like Saving Private Ryan. And also gives a better looking Draganizer mentioned on the web.

I'm going to be playing around with this.

In addition I was trying to get the file size down so I could upload here but like mchawkes indicated the compression is a killer. An odd thing occured, I uploaded it to pixcentral at 183K, decided it was too big, cropped the image in PS, saved the changes and when re-uploaded the file became 195K. Go figure.

[KR1156]

This is what i got using tlooknbill's technique. I didn't go to desaturate it to the extreme though. Just what I thought looked good.