Would anyone like to practice...

[marek]

thanks for the image...
ok my try....^_^

My version

[llinares]

Flexmanta,

Truly amazing work.
Hopefully you got the full time job you mentiomed.

[Michael 4c]

WOW Flexmanta great work,good luck with that job.

[DWThomp]

In progress #2.

[blueridge]

Well I am just starting to get serious about learning photoshop. I was having trouble downloading the raw file so I had a quick play with the low resolution file. I now have the raw so I may give it another go in the next few days.

First try

[_Steve_]

flex: Press ctrl - shift - tab up arrow key twice, and the nuclear image resizer dialogue will pop up.
...all at once?..cuz all i do i nudge the pic upwards?

[_Steve_]

marek: stunnig work...wow...wish i reach your level one day...loved it!!...wow!!

[shelly_and_roy]

Thank you for making this photo available for us to practice on. I worked on a scaled-down image, and have cropped it here to show the main work area.

[flexmanta]

Guy's you are so excited by all these cool skin techniques that you are forgetting about the rest. This photo has a serious hair problem and a head position issue as well.


http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/6053/tonyball1.jpg

[shelly_and_roy]

I, for one, am practicing some techniques, not trying to produce a magazine-ready piece with this. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the repertoire of techniques necessary to do a complete retouch on this. It's still nice to have a quality image to practice on.

[Pictus]

Bigger size http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/8...graphymg12.jpg

[roone]

Skin fix (d&b), some cloning (hair etc.), minimal liquify....

[Quantum3]

Originally Posted by flexmanta

Guy's you are so excited by all these cool skin techniques that you are forgetting about the rest. This photo has a serious hair problem and a head position issue as well.


http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/6053/tonyball1.jpg

Besides that, the whole image looks a bit washed, without contrast. And, in my very personal opinion, the pores looks a bit flat. Probably adding more contrast will give some more deepness to the pores.

[flexmanta]

Ok, this is the main problem here. People.

You got this image by Tony showing a beautyfully shot Kate with beautiful lighting. The image is in pristine 70-200 L sharpness. It doesn't get any better than that. Yet most of you are approaching the photo as if it was a 604px image downloaded from facebook.

With images like these you just cannot not sit with it and say, ok, this will be my project for the next 2 days. First of all you need to clean it. Yeah, plain old healing and cloning, and if you take less than 3 hours on that, then there is still some things that have to be cleaned. Start working from the RAW. What's the point in having a full original RAW otherwise? Then, with an image so rich in texture and, apart from the flaws, beautiful skin, you should all know that, no filter applied to the whole face at once will do any good. The skin on the forehead has different texture than the skin on the cheeks, which is different than the skin of her jaw.. no single thing will work on all those things at the same time. It just won't. And then, when you have cleaned the face, you should realize that, no matter how much you clean it, if you don't clean the hair, it was all a waste of time. And her position. And the tone.... If you take this image, work on it for 30 minutes and then upload it at the small sizes im seeing, you are wasting an opportunity to learn. Also, 100Kb allows for far bigger images.

The goal of these opportunities is not to upload something as soon as you can to mention the 2 or 3 things you did to the image. The goal for most here, is to learn. DWThomp is doing a great job. He's uploaded various WIPs. Now if you are interested in improving but don't really know how to, take this image and work on it, for days. There's just no other way.

[Quantum3]

Flexmanta, we all are learning, but at different levels. Don't expect newbies here doing the job of a pro because that's impossible at this time.

[flexmanta]

I'm not expecting that. You didn't get the meaning of my post. New people are supposed to do a bad job, we all were. But they are also supposed to do an extensive bad job by approaching these images not like you would approach a tiny facebook photo.

Take time. The goal is not to upload like... throw some plastic wrap on it and say "here's what i did, p.p.p.pplastic warpppp "

[roone]

.. and I for one am technically restricted in what i can post and where to because of workplace firewalls etc, perhaps others also work in similar environments.

I'd be interested to learn how to make better use of the 100k we are allowed on rtp however, I've tried a mixture of cropping and reducing jpeg quality, however my attachments are much smaller in dimension to others on here.

[flexmanta]

For web always use the "save for web" command in photoshop. It will compress your image and also convert it to sRGB. First, resize your your work to somewhere around 1000px (largest side), but do it with the image resize command under the image drop menu. For shrinking image, use bicubic. For some reason, the image resizer doesn't work well inside of the save for web command, so resize first, then save for web.

Steps:
-Resize to ~1000px using bicubic (image -> image resize).
-Then use save for web (file -> save for web and devices). Select JPEG, sRGB, type in a quality that gets just under 100Kb.
-The save for web command will not save your PSD file. But remember that you have resized the PSD, and it will stay so if you save accidentally save it. It's a good idea to duplicate your work (image -> duplicate), so that you don't loose all your work by accidentally saving a sized down PSD. So, duplicate, and if you want the save for web command to work quick, flatten all layers on this duplicate.

This is a 90Kb image hosted on this forum.
http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/att...8&d=1265489440

[roone]

Thanks for that flex, that's much better....

[Quantum3]

Originally Posted by flexmanta

For web always use the "save for web" command in photoshop. It will compress your image and also convert it to sRGB. First, resize your your work to somewhere around 1000px (largest side), but do it with the image resize command under the image drop menu. For shrinking image, use bicubic. For some reason, the image resizer doesn't work well inside of the save for web command, so resize first, then save for web.

Steps:
-Resize to ~1000px using bicubic (image -> image resize).
-Then use save for web (file -> save for web and devices). Select JPEG, sRGB, type in a quality that gets just under 100Kb.
-The save for web command will not save your PSD file. But remember that you have resized the PSD, and it will stay so if you save accidentally save it. It's a good idea to duplicate your work (image -> duplicate), so that you don't loose all your work by accidentally saving a sized down PSD. So, duplicate, and if you want the save for web command to work quick, flatten all layers on this duplicate.

This is a 90Kb image hosted on this forum.
http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/att...8&d=1265489440

Wow... never saw a 92 KB image with this quality, thanks for the tip bro!

[ryanchan]

Flex, great retouch job! I would kill to see your psd file. If you send me a PM you can upload it to my ftp site so that we can all see it.

-Ryan

[skilove73]

my version with a bit of liquify

[flexmanta]

Ryanchan, unfortunately the PSD is way over 1Gb. In order to make uploadable PSDs, you have to work in a specific way from the moment you start the retouch. Maybe next time.

[DWThomp]

In progress #3. Still have some skin work to do. Got around to doing a little hair cleanup for a change of pace.

[wojciech]

Rollover effect:
http://ciebiera.eu/retusze/portrait_some/

[shelly_and_roy]

Further edits:
Hair clean-up
More skin retouching
Shadow softening
Image rotation, crop
Structural: shifted head, some reshaping of face

Attached images are at the scale I have been working on.

[flexmanta]

Watch your skin tones. You have a RAW file!... there's no excuse for not having a perfect exposure (right eye, dark areas in hair...). Just make as many RAW conversions as you need, and work 16bits.

[shelly_and_roy]

Flexmanta: If that was for me, thanks for the input, but I didn't understand it. Could you be more specific about what you're seeing?

Incidentally, I can't work 16 bits: I don't have Photoshop. I can make multiple exposures of the RAW if I have a notion of what I'm going to need from the start, but I didn't this time. This is the first time I have worked from a RAW. To recover anything that I've lost, I'll have to start over -- which I don't mind, since this is all about practicing. But I'd like to get as much mileage out of this pass as I can, first.

[ringus]

Hello.
Thank you for great pic.
Here's my attempt.

BTW. Great work flexmanta!

[trb75]

First of all can I just apologise for not posting a reply sooner - have been away with work and had limited internet availability.

Secondly, I would just like to thank Flexmanta publicly for his time and effort on this image. The model in the photo loves what he has done as well as everyone else that has seen it. So thanks again!!

Thirdly, I would like to thank everyone who has attempted retouching the photo - good or bad. I am not a retoucher myself and never will be (I do basic editing to my own photos) so it is hard to pass judgement on your efforts. However I would say that if you are wanting to become good at retouching you need to listen to the likes of Flexmanta and take on board his advice. Some of you may be new to retouching and no one expects you to be an expert over night but try and get the basics right from the start and that should set you in the right direction.

Thank you once again for everyones efforts and if nothing else I hope the image has helped you in one way or another. Good luck
Tony