Portrait Processing

Hello forum,

I've become very interested in photographing people, but every time I try to do so I never know quickly enough what I want my shots to emphasize. So I decided to spend some time working with self-portraits, both to practice processing and to get a more certain feel for how to display a human in an appealing way.

This was an accidental self-portrait that I took while just checking if my focus was set correctly. I liked it and decided to practice processing on it, and I would really benefit from any criticism. Thanks in advance!

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Redirected to error image by FLICKR

your skin smoothing it too much.. and its not complete.. you can see under your eyes where you didnt do it..

wiping away too much of the poors gives a really fake... non human feel to your photo..

its a good photo overall.. the eyes are out of focus.. but he skin smoothing is what bothers me the most about this.

can you post the original?

Hee hee, it's an awful original!! Makes me look unfriendly. Disclaimer is that I'd been working on a paper for my school for about 30 hours and had not slept the night before. I do see what you mean on the skin smoothing, and I think I can fix that while still getting the desired effect. Especially the abrupt cut under my eye. Here is the original:

with your skins moothing, just lower the opacity a little so you can see poors.. other than that the edit looks pretty good. compared to the original..

what technique are you using to do it?

i use a couple different ones depending on what it is.

shannon

honestly, your eyes are WAY overdone for my taste. Yes, eyes are what makes a photo go, but in this case, they are FAR too stark for this image. Keep a bit of shadow detail in your eyes, as this helps with the spherical look of the eyes - what you did to the eyes here makes them look like they are flat. There's nothing to suggest they're round.

As far as the skin retouching, dial it down a bit. You have what looks to be the beginning of a good skin retouching, but you "over-reach" on it. I don't know what retouching technique you're using, but if you'd like for me to take a shot at using my technique, I'll be glad to do so.

For skin smoothing? I use the technique outlined here:
http://www.christyschu​ler.com/retouching.htm​l

As far as the rest, it was all fairly standard. Copied left eye to right, changed eye color using soft light blue and then two white layers over that to brighten. Increased eye size by 5-10%, used facial contouring technique also at above link, used smudge to lift my right eyebrow and right lip a little to make me look more friendly... after that just curves, hue/sat, etc...

Zansho wrote in post #6775547
honestly, your eyes are WAY overdone for my taste. Yes, eyes are what makes a photo go, but in this case, they are FAR too stark for this image. Keep a bit of shadow detail in your eyes, as this helps with the spherical look of the eyes - what you did to the eyes here makes them look like they are flat. There's nothing to suggest they're round.

As far as the skin retouching, dial it down a bit. You have what looks to be the beginning of a good skin retouching, but you "over-reach" on it. I don't know what retouching technique you're using, but if you'd like for me to take a shot at using my technique, I'll be glad to do so.

i agree with the eyes statement.. too white will amke them look fake and flat.. i overlooked it.

but i like the coloring a lot that you did.

Wow, that's pretty crazy post processing. But I agree with shanny, your skin looks really artificial, it's the pores.

Here's my 10 minute effort. Sorry I didn't change the color of your eyes, but eh, I wanted to do the skin the most :P

Okay, I think I got the skin better this time, and I studied my eyes in the original and added in shadows where I thought appropriate. Does this help?

this is much much better. i would still venture to say the whies in the eyes are still a tad too white.. but the skin is leaps and bounds better. in face i like it a lot. on the left eye.. i would lighten the eyeliner you added to give it a more grungy feel..
but overall.. this is great.

ohh yeah one last thing.. i like the color of the eyes in the first one you did.

It is much better, but the eyes still look fake. I think it's a combination of both the white being too bright and the blue being way too bright. Eyes can sometimes appear that blue but only in bright lights which doesn't fit the lighting of your image.

Okay! The final draft for tonight. I have no idea why the eye color changed, but I thought that maybe it was because in the original I forgot to convert to sRGB, but neither Adobe RGB or sRGB seemed to display the original way. I got it back closer to the original by desaturating just the eyes somewhat. Ha, the eyeliner is gone (that was also relatively accidental, coming into play with the shadowing on my eyes). I also darkened the whites of the eyes a little more, but this just makes them look a little gray. It might have been better to just do them natural... But then again, there's always more that can be done I suppose! Anyway, thanks so much for all of your help:

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Redirected to error image by FLICKR

ok. you look like robbie williams

k5bh wrote in post #6776439
ok. you look like robbie williams

I will definitely take that as a compliment!