[Rabid Penguin]

This is probably the most intensive retouching of a portait i've ever done. How did I do?

Original




Edited




So, a quick run down on what I did:

1. Cloned/healed out the white line that was running down the edge of her face for some reason.

2. Went over Jen's face with the spot healing brush and clone tool to soften her skin tone and remove blemishes and specular highlights. (Not that i don't love her just the way she is, mind you!)

3. Adjusted the fill light of the RAW in Lightroom to bring out more detail in her jacket, then imported to photoshop.

4. Dragged the fill light image onto the original as a new layer, and layer masked out everything but the jacket; merged layers.

5. Created a Painting With Light layer, and selectively lightened and darkened certain areas of the jacket, and her head and hair; merged layers.

6. Dodged the highlights in her hair.

7. Burnt the shadows in her hair.

8. Dodged the shadows on her face.

Done! It took me about an hour and a half all up, as I did a lot of it by trial-and-error, but I personally think it's vastly..okay at least slightly, improved.

[guerito]

I think you did very well. The only thing to complain is that after the lighting correction, the skin tone of the chin is different from the rest of her face, it looks almost as if she had a shade of a beard. I think this can (and should) be corrected easily...

Just as a side note, I think most of your neat work could have been avoided by using a flash. I'm saying this because this is exactly the situation where the builtin camera flash is perfectly ok, even though it's nearly useless for really lighting a scene, IMO.

[Zig]

+1 for all g. said: the main thing I'd suppose is to get the image as near as you can at the point of exposing. Guerito's point on using the camera's iinbuilt flash would be perfect for the amount of fill-flash needed to balance exposure with the background, and would avoid anything like "panda eyes" or shadows in the nose area.
That said, I think you've done a great retouche with what you had there. My best efforts were poor as I tried(see below)





Give me a nother few minutes, and I'll have a go at the second one too.....

[Zig]

I'm glad I could have another go: I wasn't happy with my attempts.
This time I desaturated slightly, then layered in a contrast-masked version.
I then layered in some diffuse glow, finally using the dodge tool to bring up the hair highlights and to bring a bit more colour to the eyes.

[Irma]

Hi RP...

I tried a bit with your portrait, and I think it is way much easier. I took the original version you posted here, so because of the size of the image I didn't have much info in the jacket to work with, anyhow, I worked just with her face. Just the light and no colors and details.



1. Copy your background layer.
2. Image>mode>lab color.... don't flatten.
3. Click channels, click lightness, hold down control click lightness mask, click lab colors in the channel palete, to select all channels and then layers to work with the image.
4. Go to Select> inverse (here you are working with shadows).
5. Call a curves adjustment layer and pull up the shadows, not much just to give light in the overall picture.
6. Merge layers
7. Work again step 3 and pull up again shadows again not much now working in hard shadows.
8. Take a soft brush and paint the places you want to keep darker and just leave the effect of this last curve layer in nose and part of the face.
Merge and change to RGB.

As I said you might work considering the jacket in this treatent as well, I didn't as I knew I had no detail.

Hope you find this useful.

Btw, I like very much the color of the light in your portrait...