my first critique

[j4str]

here is a picture i worked on for an hour or so. It wasn't super high quality, because it was a facebook pic. I mostly did it with burn/dodge and a little bit of clone stamp and healing brush

This is the first time i've ever had something critiqued, so id like to here what i should do differently if you don't like something, or what i could do in addition to, to take it a step farther

http://img815.imageshack.us/img815/8382/beforeafter.jpg

[katievaleska]

Hey there! It looks like you did a careful job of this, nice start! It's hard to do much good work to a low-res photo, but I'll comment on the changes you made.

I like the look of the mouth—it seems more defined—and the skin work looks fairly even, despite the noise inherent in the photo. The line between her nostril and the corner of her mouth looks a little flat, like a pencil line, making the face lose some depth, where before, that line lent dimension to the cheek. You could try just lightening the lower right part of that line instead of eliminating it completely.

Overall, looks good! Would love to see some hi-res work!

[j4str]

the mouth looks more defined because i upped the saturation of her lips, trying to make them a little more red. That i think gave them more contrast to the skin tone. Cuz i really didn't do anything to the mouth other than that. It might also have to do with a technique i learned for sharpening. It seemed to work really well on this low res pic, cuz the original looks blurry to me after looking at the one i did. And i hear what your talking about about that crease. I kept taking it back more and more, and it looked better to me the more i took it out, but then it was nearly completely gone.


i've been doing photoshop a long time (the wrong ways), but recently started tring to do professional type retouching (the right way). In just a couple weeks ive learned a ton. I used to just air brush right over a blemish, now i do everything i can to hang on to texture