Kyla, my twin sister

C/C?

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Maybe darken the exposed side of her face a bit but otherwise I like it.

nice lighting. natural light through a window?

disneydork06 wrote in post #4386102
nice lighting. natural light through a window?

Thanks, it's a flash bouced off a wall.

it's nice and soft.

Tis a nice shot - true the face is a tiny bit overexposed but you could probably rescue that in Photoshop/Elements etc if you wanted to. My only quibbles are the shadows caused by her cheeks are a bit harsh, and also the shadows under her left hand side chin. Good natural portrait, lovely smile. The composition works for me as well.

Dave

edit: I had a very quick play in Photoshop with this. I basically did a quick colour correction using thresholds/curves, then adjusted contrast. I then selected the face (but not the eyes or mouth), with a feather of 45. I then created a mid grey layer (shift + ctl + n on a PC), set this new layer to show grey, also to be overlay, and set it to 50% opacity. I then selected a soft edged brush and made sure that black was my foreground colour (hit the D key to set the defaults, which will do this). Then painted in on her facial skin and neck. It was a bit overdone, so when I'd finished, I simply lowered the opacity for this layer down to around 10% or so from memory. I then duplicated the layer, and did a minor sharpen - 75%, 2 pixels, 3 threshold and adjusted the opacity for this layer down to avoid the image looking oversharpened. Think it was also around 10% or so.

The 2nd image is the same, but with a rough selection of the face using the lasso tool, feathered to 15 pixels and using Neat Image to 'clean up noise'. I know it wasn't going to do a proper job of noise removal, but neat image does some funky skin softening with very small jpegs, it isn't what it should do, but sometimes it looks really nice on the skin. You can do similar things in Photoshop to soften the skin like this as well, it's just neat image does it with small jpegs by mistake and does it quickly and easily. A full size image would work properly, and neat image would NOT soften the skin like this (it's NOT meant to really soften the skin, it's just a cheap trick I've learnt that works with small jpegs).

Bugger, these are in Adobe RGB working space, so the colours will be a slight bit out probably since the web is sRGB. You can fix this by opening the jpegs in Photoshop and going edit - convert to profile and choosing sRGB. I also forgot to mention that I cleaned up a few skin blemishes with the clone tool and spot healing tool.

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Wow, thanks dpastern! I love the 2nd edit!

That's OK, just as long as you realise that it's Neat Image screwing up and not processing the skin properly. You won't be able to duplicate that with skin softening look with a large image I'm afraid, you'll have to do it via Photoshop.

Dave