Portrait touch-up (major!)

[spiralout]

My best friend's fiancee and I went to visit him over the weekend. He's in a drum corps and this was the only time we've gotten to see him in 2 months. They asked me to take a shot of them before he had to head out, but I only got the chance to take a couple before he was forced to go. I really have absolutely no experience with portraits (or with flash, for that matter), so I got some pretty nasty direct-flash highlights, and the bg was quite a bit too dark. This is my very first time editing portraits, and I didn't use any tutorial of any sort, so I'm really proud of this. :mrgreen: Hopefully you guys can give me some critique on the touch-up.

The original:

The edit:

 

[Hertz van Rental]

To be honest I prefer the first one - and the flash hot spots don't bother me. Nor does the dark background. It's not a formal shot so what you see as errors are entirely acceptable.
Nice shot of a nice couple.
If you realy feel the need to retouch then do it subtly at the pixel level and just change the whites on the guy's cheeks and the tips of both noses.
Sample the skin tone in the imediate vicinty using the eye dropper then use a single pixel pencil to dot out the whites. Do it very subtly to just drop the whites a tone or two and keep checking the effect by zooming out.

 

[Big Mike]

I also think the manipulation is too much...there are some shots that work well with this type of effect...but I don't think this is one of them.

What really bothers me is that the couple are completely in the lower half of the photo. I understand that the idea was to capture them with the background (we were here) type of thing...but I think it would look much better if you cropped the top of the photo just above his head and even some off of the right side. You still get the impression of where they are...but the photo would be more about them...which is the point...isn't it?

 

[JonMikal]

To be honest I prefer the first one - and the flash hot spots don't bother me. Nor does the dark background. It's not a formal shot so what you see as errors are entirely acceptable.
Nice shot of a nice couple.
If you realy feel the need to retouch then do it subtly at the pixel level and just change the whites on the guy's cheeks and the tips of both noses.
Sample the skin tone in the imediate vicinty using the eye dropper then use a single pixel pencil to dot out the whites. Do it very subtly to just drop the whites a tone or two and keep checking the effect by zooming out.

good advice Hertz. i would have preferred to see all of her arm with a bit of space.