Victoria's Secret sample

[MrRyan]

Hello all,

I've been on and off the forums for awhile now, and have yet to post any work. I grabbed a quick crop of some retouching I had laying on my desktop, and thought it only fair to share myself. No sense in lurking on here... haha.

It's from our most recent Dream Angels campaign. From conception, to direction, to the shoot, and down to Miranda, this campaign has been one of my favorites in recent years.

Critique, comment, query, advise, do as you'd like!

-MrRyan

P.S. It is lower res and optimized within the 100KB limit. Once my site is up, I'll
be sure to link to some larger samples.

[Sweetlight]

MrY,

I was not quite clear if you retouched it or shot it or both, nevertheless.

The light is gorgeous great open shadows and specular highlights.

The shot is beautiful and the working of the image.

If I could offer any critique it would be minimal -
The end of her nose kind of bleeds into that bright highlight behind it. It could have been caught when it was shot but since it was not I would consider giving the end of her nose a bit more density, maybe matching the open shadow on the rest of her nose. At the least just give it enough of a tweak so it separates from the background.
You might consider burning the bottom right corner down a bit, your eye kind of gets caught there and pulled out of the image.
On her right side the little hairs are catching the light funny and it kind of looks like little beads on the ends of them. With the earthy, outdoor type of shot it is not so bad to have some fly away hairs like the wind is blowing but you might wanna consider cloning them a little shorter.

Those are just a few minor things to consider. I worked the image attached with a technique that emulates the old Hasselblad soft focus. If you have never used one it is well known to create some beautiful soft, dreamy images. I'll give you the simple steps below if you are interested in the process.

Open your image and make two duplicate layers.
On one layer choose the "darkness" in the fly down menu on your layers palette - make image opacity 30 percent - add a gaussian blur making the blur amount roughly the same as the MB size of your image.
On the other duplicate layer = Lightness - 70% - add guassian blur equal to image size again.
Merge the two duplicate layers. It will be a bit to blurry most likely so work the opacity of that layer so that it blends with the bottom layer and creates the amount of softness you want.
Flatten and done.

Hope this helps,

Chris

[skauskas]

no bad critique MrRyan! 100% great work!

[MrRyan]

Hello sweetlight/skauskas,

Thanks for your comments. I assisted w/ the direction for the photoshoot, [coming up with the initial concept (lighting, color, angles, feel, etc.)], and retouched it once we got the images back. The photography was done by Russel James.

As for the dreamy look sweetlight, I typically will "merge all" a duplicate layer, desaturate it, run a motion blur filter on a 45º that extends past the edges of the model about 15%, then set that layer to overlay/luminosity and knock it back to 30-40%. That's my quick and dirty way of bumping up contrast while softening hard edges in the hair, etc. None of that was done here of course. It wouldn't fly. I like the greased lens/ soft focus aesthetic of yours though, and the ability to scale it up/down to your liking is always nice.

[MrRyan]

Just viewed your portfolio skauskas, really great work.
There aren't many people making such drastic improvements
with very subtle work. Who is the photographer you are working with?
Is it you alone that is directing the retouching?

[skauskas]

Hello MrRyan

Thank you very much for your kind words.
My photographer is Lambis Stratoudakis (http://apneaimages.com/) and yes I'm directing retouching alone.

[tdh]

I think it looks great! MrRyan!