I've never been a portrait guy

Eddie_uv777 · Mar 18, 2008

But I tried this time lol.

MarcusM · Mar 18, 2008

Nice shot, beautiful girl. I just wish there wasn't so much negative space. The clutter in the background is distracting. It might have helped to use a larger aperture to blur the background more.

Emerana · Mar 18, 2008

i think the background is good if it has something to do with her (although perhaps if she was dressed different to apply to the background). Or if it is part of a story (in whick you might want to have a larger dof). Otherwise, on its own and meaning nothing...its odd. Crop it out

Eddie_uv777 · Mar 18, 2008

We were in Taco Bell, if that adds anything.

MarcusM · Mar 18, 2008

Eddie_uv777 said:
We were in Taco Bell, if that adds anything.

LOL, in that case I would think you'd want to blur the background out so this fact is completely unrecognizable.

Eddie_uv777 · Mar 19, 2008

This any better?

Sw1tchFX · Mar 19, 2008

Well the square works, if anyone asks, you just shot with a hasselblad, right?

Well, I cleaned up her face and made the color almost nonexistent, sharpened the eyes and lips and burned the background. Just a quick fix, but I think if you did something along the same lines, it communicates a little better, and looks less like a taco bell.

roentarre · Mar 19, 2008

Nice shot. I love the pop factor in the frame

JimmyO · Mar 19, 2008

Haha, at first glance i thought she was a teacher in a classroom.

Nice shot, i like it alot!

Eddie_uv777 · Mar 19, 2008

I think the black and white one. Although, her eyes had already been sharpened.

Shibby! · Mar 20, 2008

Hopefully you don't mind my edit..

It's a good picture and a pretty girl.

Photobucket is killing the image for me. Hopefully it's not too soft though.

Eddie_uv777 · Mar 23, 2008

Nice! mind if I ask what you did in to make her skin soft like that?

Trenton Romulox · Mar 23, 2008

If you could take the eyes from Switch's edit and throw them in Shibby's edit, you'd have one nice portrait.

MarcusM · Mar 23, 2008

Shibby's edit looks too unnatural IMO. The skin looks very edited.

Shibby! · Mar 25, 2008

Eddie_uv777 said:
Nice! mind if I ask what you did in to make her skin soft like that?

It has been edited a bit. I know some don't like the look and I don't either on certain pictures. All depends what you are going after.

Some basic things I did. I am by no means good at PS, but I'll list what I did and how I did it.

1) Cropped picture. I didn't like the bright yellow and other clutter in the background. It isn't to a certain size, I simply resized it so you might have to edit it to a 8x10 or something.

2) Strengthened her highlights in the hair by dodging and some light sponging.

3) Increased saturation on her lips. Smoothed them a bit as well.

4) Added more brown to her eyes by a adding a lighter brown in a seperate layer and blending.

5) Dodged the white of her eyes a bit more

6) Applied a light guassian blur to the whole picture to help with the skin and make the eyes and mouth stand out more. Used the history brush ( you can use the paint brush) to mask off the eyes, eye brows, mouth, nose, hair, jaw line, etc.

7) Finished up with some clone stamping of neck wrinkles, and cleaned up the skin using this technique.

8) Dodged and removed the blur a bit on the neckless. I like it =) Fits her dark, but warm nature.

9) Burnt the background to draw more attention to her face and less to the yellow background.

10) Sharpen the picture with the "unsharp" feature.

Any questions just ask. I just fool around with those things the most. Use very low flow and opacity %'s when dodging/burning, and use a %history/brush when removing gaussian so it fades the line to appear less altered.

PM me if need to. I don't get on the forum enough to keep up with posts I make.