Need critique please! :)

[sirespen]

Hi there! I just "finished" these image. I`m afraid i have a bit overdone the D&B part. And the Hair looks a bit strange... Anyway, i don't want to retouch this image anymore, i need a critique so that i can start with a new image and make it better

Please be serious and severely!

Here the high res:
http://img291.imageshack.us/my.php?image=beforegd4.jpg
http://img291.imageshack.us/my.php?image=afterht6.jpg

Thanks in advance!

[amica999]

Ciao, i think the skin is too white for this type of modell, brown hair, dark brown eyes = no white skin :-) the hair looks cut out and it looks more like a halo oraound his head than an effect... but that's just my opinion

[sirespen]

Hallo amica!
Thanks for your post. Yeah..the effect.. you are right, it looks a bit strange. How would you get a more realistic hair boarder? Add flying Hairs or what would you do?

Du kommst aus Deutschland, oder?

Ciao Sebi

[amica999]

Ciao Sebi, yes, I am german, but have relatives in Italy. Not sure how you extracted the hair, but I mostly aim to do extraction by channel manipuation. There used to be a good tut on Russel Brown's website, but it's currently not available (maybe search for Russell Brown if the website has changed...) A common workaround is smudging flyaways in with a small brush... maybe you want to look at this: http://www.photoshopmama.net/chores/...p5.html?reload there should be a tut on hairs...

[amica999]

here is a quick shot of masking... copy blue channel, on copy select all and copy channel on itself, go to edit fade and set blend mode to vivid light, run levels on channel increase contrast and invert (move black slider all the way to the right and white all the way to the left) use lasso tool to select inside of face and hair and fill with white, use dogde and burn tool to lighten the subject and burn to darken the background, first set to búrn midtones with about 50% opacity, be careful on the dtrays though...and voila...I just did a quick job on this, but with a little more care you can protect more of the hairs....

[amica999]

Ciao Sebi, following our chat topic you can find me on ICQ with following ID 441966190. During the day I am bound with telephone conferencing most of the time...
This information is not exclusively, if you want to get in touch with me, just try :-)

[sirespen]

Hallo! Thx!