Beauty retouch cc pls.

hi guys,

i need your thoughts about my retouch please.

Photographer: Salden Eltagonde

Very nice job. Specially in controlling those specular highlights on her face. Good skin retouching without killing the structure too. I like how you balanced the skin tone on her hand but am wondering if you didn't take too much from the highlights there. The hand looks a bit flat (just a little bit). The only real flaw I see is in her fingernails. They look a bit fake, specially the index finger. That and the ever so slight halo on the background above her hair.

Overall, well done.

I think I would also make the background gray and reduce the saturation somewhat. On my monitor, her skin looks a bit orange and the bg is greenish.

Agree with Duck & Navy, and I'd add that you might clone out the second (lower) catchlight in both eyes.

here's my latest version....

Duck, NavyDoc and Qbx thank you. all noted.

Duck you're right about the fingernails. i can't make it realistic. more practice.

This silly model didn't make her fingernails done.

For her nails, you might try adding a highlight to make them appear glossy.
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I think you did a great job overall. You've kept detail in her skin which is the most important part when touching up the skin.

The two parts that hit me is the border on the left side of her face. One is directly to the left of her lower lip and the other is roughly left of her upper lip / nose. Right where the skin meats the background, it looks like its smudged.

there's some weird stuff going on with skin tones bleeding into the background around her cheek, shown below.

a linear gradient with the same darker color and a lighter value of the same color in the middle makes a nice fake fingernail, again shown below. I isolated the area with the path tool, made it a selection and then filled it with the gradient. I probably could have rotated it a bit more clockwise to really match the contour of the nail, but hey, you get what you pay for. The main thing is that the lighter part of the reflection should stretch all the way to the ends of the nail.

hope this helps, also wondering if there was a specific technique you used to remove the highlights on the skin? you did a nice job with it.

both of these are enlarged 200 percent for clarity.

On my non-calibrated monitor, her pupil and iris are too similar, I would lighten (and maybe warm) the iris a little.

Redoing her nails will be a lot easier than you think. Pull up so reference photos to use as a guide and create a new layer. Change it to multiply and build up the values. Then with a soft eraser or even the dodge tool, work the highlights in, using the reference as a guide.

Sooooo......

Edges are the real problem here, I guess. The hair on the back of her head and the cheek edge on the left - there's bluriness and smudginess.

Matter of taste - I would never get rid of under-eye lines completely - it does not matter if there is correct texture or not - it goes plasticy way and I hate that. But from other side - there's a lot of people, who like super-smooth plastic "wonderness".

And nails, obv.

Thing that grabs my attention is the stray bit of hair on her right side. Otherwise, I think you did a good job.