What do you think of this retouching style?

[emilylt87]

Snap shot i took of myself using a tripod at home. Had fun playing around with it , let me know what you think. feel free to play with it too. The colored one kind of looks like the smudging technique without all the smudging, lol

http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m...icanbeauty.jpg

http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m...sepiasmall.jpg

http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m...eautycolor.jpg

www.myspace.com/kissofglamour

[subxaero]

you kinda forgot the nose. it sort of blends in with the face after your retouch...and even tho you did some nice work with the new texture of her dress and her flower (forgot the shadow?), i dont really like the shot itself

[byRo]

Originally Posted by subxaero

... i dont really like the shot itself

I did like the shot - just didn't like much what emilylt87 did with it.

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There are some good things in the image, and some bad.

Beautiful young lady
Interesting pose
Nice sweater

Very textured carpet
Jeans don't fit in with things
Nothing draws your attention to the face

You shouldn't separate retouching and art, they are not mutually exclusive alternatives. I saw on your site that you retouch (BTW, much too much blur), so you should be able to concentrate on the GOOD things and avoid the BAD.
The quality of your final art dependes directly on the quality of your initial image. So take some time to fix that first.

To get rid of the bad, this is what I did:
- Blurred the background so the carpet texture doesn't take over;
- Removed your jeans (er.... ).
- Cropped and rotated to get some diagonals leading to the face.

I posted the base image and a couple of "arts"

Rô

[emilylt87]

I knew the pose was very strange, that why i liked it haha. i really didn't use a blur on this one, i played with highlight/shadow adjustment. and highpass layers. Then a overal sepia. Thanks for your input!

[byRo]

Originally Posted by emilylt87

..i really didn't use a blur on this one,.... highpass layers.

OK, but don't forget - if you're subtracting a high-pass layer you are actually doing a Gaussian Blur - works out to the be same thing.

Rô

[emilylt87]

i used a high pass layer set to overlay, so it was sharpening, but i did see somewhere a skin technique blurring with high pass layer, didn't like it to much.

[Miss Liz]

honestly, i think you did a little too much editing. it does not look natural. i like how the shirt has a pattern to it in the black and white picture, but the skin looks too fake

[jam1212]

Originally Posted by emilylt87

i used a high pass layer set to overlay, so it was sharpening, but i did see somewhere a skin technique blurring with high pass layer, didn't like it to much.

I'm a little confused about your workflow. I understand that you sharpened with a high-pass layer, but which technique did you use to smooth the skin? Something besides sharpening was obviously done to the skin. (e.g. there is much less noise visible and the tones looked more blended overall) Could you share what you did to achieve that?