C&C on two portraits

[ktan7]

Lighting on first one is a bit flat; love the lighting on second image.

 

[cptkid]

This is the photo that I actually ment to upload as the first image.

I like these so much I actually want to attempt to charcoal sketch them, esp 2. I won't though, I mean at least not without your permission.

Go right ahead, my photos are fine to be edited =]

I corrected the white balance (ACR White Balance Tool, clicked on her shirt) .
Her eye whites still had a reddish cast, so I selected the eye whites and corrected that by making the selection a B&W layer.
I locally sharpened her eyes, nose, and lips with the Sharpen tool set to 65%, Protect Detail.
I slightly lowered the ends of her mouth (Puppet Warp).
I cropped some off the left of the frame so the right edge of her face (camera left) is on the left vertical RoT line.
I added a thin black border.

Wow, you certainly did a bit of work

I like the edit, but the quality is really bad, did you compress it loads or something ?

Lighting on first one is a bit flat; love the lighting on second image.

Thanks for your C&C

 

[Rosy]

love #2

 

[KmH]

I corrected the white balance (ACR White Balance Tool, clicked on her shirt) .
Her eye whites still had a reddish cast, so I selected the eye whites and corrected that by making the selection a B&W layer.
I locally sharpened her eyes, nose, and lips with the Sharpen tool set to 65%, Protect Detail.
I slightly lowered the ends of her mouth (Puppet Warp).
I cropped some off the left of the frame so the right edge of her face (camera left) is on the left vertical RoT line.
I added a thin black border.

Wow, you certainly did a bit of work

I like the edit, but the quality is really bad, did you compress it loads or something ?

All that work took about 90 seconds. The longest part was using the Polygonal Lasso tool to select the eye whites, 20-25 seconds.
Puppet Warp took 15-20 seconds.

The image here on TPF is only has resolution of 800 x 529 pixels, though the file size is something like 1.2M.
Cropping reduced the resolution somewhat, and I resized the image so it is 756 x 545 px. I saved it at a JPEG Quality setting of 2, which left it at 1.18M for the file size.