Please critique

[alek_o]

Hey guys, please tell what you think about this retouch?
http://aleksandrolkhovskiy.com/beforeaftersli.html
Thanks

[skoobey]

Skin is too smooth and the color is off, so are the highlights which are too smooth. Lips are dry.

And the image in general wasn't a very good place to start.

[Mike Needham]

I think he meant to add a "Welcome to the forum!" too

Looks like a fine bit of skin work to me as far as it goes. Perhaps more attention to the hair and some more work on the finer shading and the like, but to me the skin looks ok.

[Anthony Wood]

Hello and thank you for posting. It looks very good and well executed but to my taste it's a little too smooth. It depends on your purpose and what your intentions were but I like the nose in the original. To me it reveals character. Like you I'm new here and just finding my way...so my comments are not based on re-touching expertise.

[skoobey]

Originally Posted by Mike Needham

I think he meant to add a "Welcome to the forum!" too

Looks like a fine bit of skin work to me as far as it goes. Perhaps more attention to the hair and some more work on the finer shading and the like, but to me the skin looks ok.

And also WELCOME TO THE FORUMS!

I forget sometimes that I have to write smiley faces, not just put on a facial expression.

[kav]

You might consider being a little more careful with maintaining some kind of hair edge on the left side of the photo. The hair in general would be a little annoying here. It's not great, but if this is your only frame, you don't have any perfect options there. Parts of the skin are starting to trend toward overdone, and you did kind of kill some definition in parts, but looking at the starting point on some of the texture, it's not necessarily an easy one. The semi-randomness of the texture will throw most people off quite a bit. Some of the decisions are a little inconsistent which bothers me. You made some flat spots in the lighting.

I'll give some examples. I wouldn't want to flatten it out so much above the brow. That cheekbone is a tough decision, but it would need better gradation. The decisions on the hair are somewhat inconsistent. The texture is smoothed down inconsistently. Like on the highlight related to the cheekbone and orbit, it's smoothed to where you're kind of losing texture in an area where you would expect larger pores, but then on the eyelid, it's more prominent. Either might be accepted, but the image needs some kind of continuity so that you're not drawn to things that feel out of place. While the nose and above the lip might be tough areas to shade, I think you're making them a bit too flat. That line from the orbit going to the bridge of the nose is a tough issue too. On the lips, I don't think brightening the highlight on the lower lip was a good idea. It already looks a little dry. Trying to smooth it without making it look retouched and lacking in texture would not be fun, but I don't think accentuating the dryness takes this in a good direction. The eyebrow could probably be fixed slightly without going too fake or creating problems. The lashes look clumpy and blocked up. It's mainly the ones closest to the nose. They're much heavier. I'd understand if you were trying to get through this within a certain amount of time, but that isn't something I'd wish to see on a portfolio piece.

This probably seems pretty negative, but I've tried to explain the reasoning so it's not just a bunch of useless nitpicky comments. I also wanted to acknowledge things that might be more difficult because some of these shadows seem a bit blocked up meaning if you wanted to soften but retain, you might be looking at several passes to get it just right. Most of the hair removal seems pretty seamless, which is good. When you have a really random skin pattern accentuated like this (not that it's completely uncommon) it's tough to hit a good balance between texture and smoothness, but the style needs to be consistent throughout the photo.

[alek_o]

auch I thought nobody replied and after a while just didn't opened this page again until now.
Thanks for replies guys, much appreciated, especially kav, very detailed critique, thanks a lot, hopefully I will learn something from it and will be more consistent on future images.
Thanks!