C&C Portraits Please

[The_Traveler]

A couple of points

Used portraitpro which softened the skin.

You are in control. PP is a tool and if the results are not to your liking, fix the tool.
If you find either you don't see a problem that others see or don't know how to fix it, then that's a direction to go in your learning before posting images as complete

What aperture would you say is most common for portraits?

Shoot with two goals in mind: getting everything you want to be sharp in focus and getting the sharpness you want.
To these ends, use dofmaster.com to understand relationship between focal length, aperture and DOF and know where the 'sweet spot' is for your lens.

 

[tirediron]

PortraitPro makes any portrait look anything but pro

Actually PortraitPro works very well, but you have to take it out of "Auto" and actually control the adjustments individually.

 

[Granddad]

I was going to add the same as Tirediron but he beat me to it (again). I love Portrait Pro but you still have to do the work: Letting it make the decisions is like setting your camera on fully automatic and expecting to get pro level portrait photos.

One technique I use is to slightly over smooth in PP then take the image back into Photoshop, paste the uncorrected face back on top and then fade that back till it's where I want it to be.

 

[benp2k6]

Great advice! Thank you all. I was trying to post a raw image for you to edit with your touch if interested. Would like to see some of your flavors in action. Any way to get a 25.6 mb raw on here?

Edit: spelling

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[detjo]

I've only just started to get into portraits. I recently bought a Nikkor 85mm f1.8 and, during testing, found a very noticeable difference with eyes between f1.8 and f4
I'm thinking I won't be using it wide open too much, tbh.