C&C On photo

Hey guys ,

Please can you C&C on my photo I did of a friend!

Flash was on camera left.

Edited in Photoshop.

Please tell me any way or anything I can improve on? I need to get a portfolio and ill be using some of these pics!

Iso 400
1/250 second
F6.3
2 flashes (One camera left and one on camera)

Thanks

Flash is pretty hot there to the forehead and cheeks. Did you use any kind of modifier?

And skin work is a bit too smooth.

nope it was an impromptu session , no modifiers!

I think the flash from the left, "under" her face, is giving her bags under eyes. Other than that, I think it's nice.

Not really keen on the "high key" version. I'd work on the original version because the skin tones look more natural. Very pretty model and a nice shot.

The strong lighting from the left has made her jaw line disappear.
Also weird highlights around her left eye.
Like the original more than the edited version.

Thanks guys ,

The lighting I had a friend hold my flash up on my left....as I said it was an impromptu shoot

I honestly prefer the High key photo , although its a pity her jaw line has dissapeared , I shot in raw so I guess I could get it back


Final Edit then im leaving this picture alone!!! lol

Umm. i didn't notice the missing jawline. The eyes captured me immediately...I wasn't interested in looking anywhere else.

As far as the post processing goes, I prefer the contrast of the original. That one has "the eyes" that are captivating. With the lower contrast versions, I'm not drawn in.

Did I say "Wow!" yet? I meant to.

You really can't use that last picture. Look closely around her left eye. And look at the hairline above her left eye. You need to fix those serious imperfections before you show this to anyone.
Here's my take off your original. fixed imperfections, lightened arm, darkened cheek, sharpened eyes. I cropped a little tighter to eliminate some arm since it was taking up a lot of skin-area and her face should be the main focus.

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Hi QBX

Excellent work!

please can you explain to me how you did this?

I know how to use photoshop CS5 but the wierd light on her left eye seemed tooo tricky to fix?


Thank you for showing me!

The original didn't have the red imperfection around the hairline so the main fix was the uneven light pattern above and below her left eye. In each case I first selected the area that needs fixing. I used the quick selection tool. If you select too much then change the tool to deselect and chop off portions until the selection reasonably matches the area you want to work on. Then feather the selection 2 pixels (SELECT-MODIFY-FEATHER). I then tried the patch tool. It didn't look good. So I tried using the clone stamp selecting an area above her eyebrow as a source. It looked better but I still had to do a little blurring to even things out. I think the area between her eye and eyebrow could use a bit more work still.
To darken her cheek I selected the bright areas, feathered as above, created a new adjustment layer of levels, set the layer type to multiply then adjusted opacity to my liking. Smoothed out transitions by using a black brush on the layer mask.
Did the same to the arm but set layer type to screen to lighten.
Finally I used clone-stamp around her face using opacity around 20% and mode to color to darken various hot spots.
For the eyes, I selected & feathered them as above then applied smart-sharpen at 1 pixel about 100% as I recall.
It was a quick & dirty job - about 10 minutes. If you take your time you can do much better.
Cheers!

hmmm

Thanks for your reply!

porky-