Portrait

I'd like to read your comments regarding the processing I did on this portrait I took of one of my granddaughters. I'll post the original shortly.

Here's the original image. Like a lot of teens, my granddaughter has her share of acne. I also thought the lighting was a bit harsh. So, I tried to clean up her skin and lower the contrast. I also tried to get a bit 'fancy' by adding a bit of glow to the image and replaced the gray background by masking in something that had a little color.

I used CS6, Portraiture and Nik Color Efex Pro 2 to edit this shot. Lighting was a 580 EXII in a 24" softbox, camera right and a white reflector, camera left.

That's a pretty good edit.
What I don't like is that it losses all the detail around the chin and neck area. It's to soft on the skin and it needs some texture added.
the smoothness takes away the depth and make it all look "one surface".

In a smaller image it may not be that noticeable..but with a larger print out..the worse it will be.
I love the background too. except for the chin and shoulder area on the right of the image. it looks cut and pasted.
use a smooth brush with some feather to it to get rid of that cut out look.

oh...and I just noticed..the glasses. See how the lens difference in the glasses makes the edge of her skin not line up?
I would shave that off and line it up. (just to note..I see that you shaved it off in the processed one..however it isn't lined up very good at the bottom)
If I could say one more thing about the glasses....the rim lines up with the top of the eyes. I would want to see her whole eye looking through the glass. But that's just nit-piky I suppose.

Thanks for the detailed comments. My greatest concern was ending up with skin looking too smooth due to the amount of retouch work needed and the thin DOF.

Beautiful young lady and well captured. I do agree that the skin treatment looks a bit overdone but....I tried it with LR5 and the clarity slider and it unfortunately needs quite a bit of work. The major issues I found were the skin tone going a bit red in random areas.

Based on that I should think your edit is quite good.

I don't get a chance to work on portraits much any more so I took a second shot at it with a quick run through Pro Retouch from Rad Actions. I actually quite liked that treatment. I see I've over done the eyes which really didn't need much of anything and could have gotten a bit closer to the eye glass frame with the smoothing brush.

Thanks for the comments and the edit Dave. Her skin was quite a challenge.

IMO, you don't want to make the skin "look perfect" because then it looks plastic/fake...

IMAGE LINK: http://s1259.photobuck​et.com …fore_zpsa7a6ff2​2.png.html

I think Titus' edit looks about the best.

She seems awfully young to be wearing lined bifocals. Matter of fact, I thought they quit making lined bifocals in favor of the progressive lenses.

I think of skin smoothing like I do with noise reduction - you use it to reduce and not to eliminate.

Thanks for the additional comments, although I'm not sure what type of bifocals she has is in any way relevent. She wears what her parents could afford.

Since it's difficult to see at the resolution restriction here, I'm adding a 100% crop to show that there is still some detail in the skin. I was hoping the smooth areas would be percieved as a result of the thin depth of field...perhaps I was wrong in that hope.

There are several ways to fix blemishes without making the skin unnaturally smooth; dodging and burning or Frequency Separation work the best in cases like this one.

Suddie1215 wrote in post #16164797
There are several ways to fix blemishes without making the skin unnaturally smooth; dodging and burning or Frequency Separation work the best in cases like this one.

Thanks, I'll have to revisit those techniques, especially frequency seperation and practice.

looks really nice but in my opinion, looks a little soft and you have brought down to clarity to much.