Beauty Retouch Critique - Please Be HONEST

[DarthGreater]

I have not really learned to much about retouching yet, so I would really like as much feedback as you can give..especially if you notice some areas that I missed (I am sure there are many!). I really appreciate you guys taking time to view this post. Have a great evening/day!

Before:
http://i.imgur.com/JS3nYrf.jpg

After:
http://i.imgur.com/Td8n1BR.jpg





Image Copyright: © Jozef Zidarov, FindRetoucher.com

[Wolfman]

Re: Beauty Retouch Critique - Please Be HONEST

Looks like you did some strong blurring of the skin. Look up some tutorials on skin retouching. Study dodging & burning. In fact this would be a good place to start: http://www.modelmayhem.com/po.php?thread_id=935152
Give a good overview of workflow from start to finish.

[DarthGreater]

Re: Beauty Retouch Critique - Please Be HONEST

I am having trouble with maintaining texture in the skin or adding additional texture. Even with split frequency I still struggled with maintaining the texture, do you have any insight on how to go about this? Thank you for the feedback I appreciate it very much.

[Wolfman]

Re: Beauty Retouch Critique - Please Be HONEST

It looks to me that you did some heavy blurring which eliminated whatever texture you had to work with. Do not blur the skin. Study the link I recommended and others to learn how to treat skin without blurring it into oblivion. Blurring skin is a no no in the upper level world of retouching.

It takes patience and a lot of practice to learn and execute the proper way to retouch skin. Do your research.

Start here:

retouching: Krunoslav Stifter

If you want to take a look, here are the links to all the episodes so far. Cheers!

Editorial Retouch From Start To Finish, Part 1 - Series overview

http://youtu.be/eylH7O0DB-g

Editorial Retouch From Start To Finish, Part 2 - Analyzing the refernece images

http://youtu.be/GUQ4mehwyb8

Editorial Retouch From Start To Finish, Part 3 - Camera raw and smart objects workflow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8nTNcDWvyg

Editorial Retouch From Start To Finish, Part 4 - Photoshop workflow overview

http://youtu.be/6G160TyaCGc

Editorial Retouch From Start To Finish, Part 5 - Masking and selective adjustments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn-SUG7IE38

Editorial Retouch From Start To Finish, Part 6 - Clean up tips & tricks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOrr1-XkD9o

Editorial Retouch From Start To Finish, Part 7 - Dodging and Burning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLYE5I_-4tE

Editorial Retouch From Start To Finish, Part 8 - Putting it all together
http://youtu.be/jc9W5CCfbK8?list=PLGg0M … aEPdElsb8t

Editorial Retouch From Start To Finish, Part 9 - Matching the color in camera raw and Photoshop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc4Iy2OWebo

Editorial Retouch From Start To Finish, Part 10 - Develop flexible workflow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6fd9rk3FOw

Editorial Retouch From Start To Finish, Part 11 - Sharpening, File types and Color Management

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ925_wRxF8

[DarthGreater]

Re: Beauty Retouch Critique - Please Be HONEST

Oh man, Thank you so much. In the video I learned frequency separation, they said to use gaussian blur on the tones to smooth it and the High frequencies to clone stamp uniform texture...I didn't 'directly' blur the skin if that is what you mean I would never do that! Maybe I just cloned from texture that was too smooth then when I touched up and resized the image all texture was lost? In any case I REALLY REALLY appreciate you taking the time to help me out!

Here is a closeup of the higher res to show that there is some texture...

http://i.imgur.com/UqTN5yY.jpg

I will go through the resources you have supplied and I will continue to practice, quite obviously I need to learn more...It is only my first real attempt so, can only go up from here!

Thanks again!

[klev]

Re: Beauty Retouch Critique - Please Be HONEST

I am having trouble with maintaining texture in the skin or adding additional texture. Even with split frequency I still struggled with maintaining the texture, do you have any insight on how to go about this? Thank you for the feedback I appreciate it very much.

Most of the time I wouldn't add any additional texture. Some people do copy porous areas for continuity purposes if they don't exist. I don't bother to do that. Split has nothing to do with it. You have to be careful about what you remove and be honest with yourself regarding what is available in the original image.

My suggestion as always is really to study images of people more than photoshop tutorials. I think they're just really misleading in that they often guide you toward a recipe book approach. It's not just texture. You need to pay more attention to facial structure, especially at the beginning.

[DarthGreater]

Re: Beauty Retouch Critique - Please Be HONEST

Excellent, thank you. I really appreciate the fact you guys give such helpful feedback. I have a lot to learn so everything's i get is going into a notebook so i can study as i progress.

[DarthGreater]

Re: Beauty Retouch Critique - Please Be HONEST

You need to pay more attention to facial structure

Can you be more specific about where I went wrong in regards to facial structure of this image? I may have a BFA in Multimedia & Graphic Design, but I don't have to convince any of you that retouching is a completely different monster. This is not much like anything I have really done so I just want to make sure everything is elaborated on as far as the pros and cons of my image so I can use the information appropriately to become a better artist...Thanks again, I am grateful for the feedback.

[klev]

Re: Beauty Retouch Critique - Please Be HONEST

Can you be more specific about where I went wrong in regards to facial structure of this image? I may have a BFA in Multimedia & Graphic Design, but I don't have to convince any of you that retouching is a completely different monster. This is not much like anything I have really done so I just want to make sure everything is elaborated on as far as the pros and cons of my image so I can use the information appropriately to become a better artist...Thanks again, I am grateful for the feedback.

I know I can be a little abstract at times. I dislike split because I sometimes find subtle side effects and few advantages to compensate for the increased file size. It's not exactly a new concept, as decompositions have been used in edge finding techniques for a very long time. It's actually a significant area of research, but I'm not going to drift into nerd talk today.

When I zoom in I can see that you did put quite a bit of detail into some of this. It's really tedious removing that many hairs from someone's face. My concerns are that it killed the shape of the lips. I don't personally care for the enlarged eye there, but that isn't the real problem. You lost the shape of the orbit/eye socket. Going more toward the temple you created a very flat look along there. A lot of that can be avoided by being extremely careful, and you can emphasize some of this a bit with shading if you're really careful.

I could spend a lot longer describing this, and it's something that I see quite often as I've done the same thing. I personally found good reference material more helpful than anything. I like shape and structure, so I used a combination of anatomical illustrations and artist reference material. If you have a second display, keep it up beside you so that you can refer to it often.

The very last thing is that you seem to have some undesirable hue shifts in the skin highlights. This isn't uncommon, but the magenta highlights tend to make the skin look less healthy unless it's just my screen. I'm on my notebook at the moment, and it's dying. I only got it to boot by disabling all graphics libraries after logging using a root login to single user mode. That has the side effect that it's not properly color managed at the moment as that's typically a pre-framebuffer operation.

[NCP Doug]

Re: Beauty Retouch Critique - Please Be HONEST

One of the last things that I do is to place my "finished" layer on top of the previous layer that has just curves and skin corrections, then take the "finished layer opacity down by 10% steps to see if I have overdone it (I find that I often overprocess the "finished" - just old eyes?)