Ky-Tia

[erniehatt]

This is my other granddaughter, I would appreciate some critique on this especially the B/W convertion. I selected the eyes and mouth inversed it and added a small amount of blur to soften the features, then sharpened the eyes etc to focus the attention on them. I had 4 different shots like this that I would have liked to posted together, can anyone tell me how it is done. Ernie

 

[PlasticSpanner]

How honest do you want the critique? I'm no expert in portraits let alone photography but this is what I see!.....

The DOF blur around the neck looks odd. I can see it's been added afterwards but the ear is still in focus even though it's at the same distance.
The ear itself is a little distracting esp the earring. It might be better to crop closer to remove it completely or much wider to include it and some background?
I like how the eyes are not dead center but it seems the crop is too tight on the right side of her head.
Maybe a softer light or something would prevent the highlight on her cheek and the shadow under her chin?
The colour of her iris's is very vivid and nice but the whites of her eyes looks too white and artificial and have a very hard edge.

But what nice hair and skin colours and such a huge smile! I know portraits are supposed to be better in B&W to remove skin blemishes & such but I really prefer the colour version.

 

[erniehatt]

Thankyou my friend for the very blunt and educated critique, this is what I put my photographs up here for. I agree with most of your comments, perhaps you will understand the reason behind them. The reason for the close crop on the right, was because the pic has been rotated to the left, as she was resting her head on her hand on a table. also it was taken at a resteraunt on her 9th birthday, so wanted to get rid of the clutter. The soft focus on the neck is as you suggest is artificial, put there simply to throw more focus on the face. The highlight on the cheek comes from the use of flash. I did touch up the whites of the eyes on the coloured one, (to much).
As for the mono one I usually dont go much for them, but was trying out a plugin. thanks again Ernie