Couple of my daughter

Just now starting to use cs5 instead of Corel Paintshop. I hat having to learn new software, that's the worst part of working with computers to me. Youtube has some great learning vids though.

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lovely model, great focus in these

flash . off

Are you saying i should not have used the fill flash? Seems like i always worry about the face not standing out a bit and I try and use fill, but not really sure exactly when I should do this. Should it be strictly for back lit situations?

chrisvanbeekum wrote in post #15016886
flash . off

Flash may have been a little bit too hot on these...Bump it down a notch or two, but don't turn it off...I don't like her facial expression in the first one(she looks mad)...Much sweeter in the 2nd one...She's very beautiful!

did you do something to the area under her eyes? I see some kind of artifacts or blotchiness....maybe its my laptop screen.

I'll give the lower frlash settings a try next time. I don't recall what i did under her eyes but I think it's probably her makeup I guess. These young girls do some strangle stuff with their makeup these days that I just don't get. Also could be circles under her eyes a bit, she probably got that from me as I have those darker areas and I probably didn't notice it.

I can see some of your retouch brush strokes so I believe you are doing destructive edits to the image directly. If you don't know how to do it, look up "frequency separation", you'll get much better results. Also, in general, when doing retouching work like that, turn down both the opacity and fill on the brush and don't go overboard otherwise you'll end up with the skin looking like clay.

I find that I get the best results when I use the patch tool for major blemishes and for general smoothing and minor blemishes I use a brush at 25% opacity and 25% fill on the texture (non-color) layer via frequency separation.

The only other thing is that it looks like you may have upped the saturation on the picture. Dial it back a little bit if you did so it is closer to the natural color.