If you have the eye for beauty and light, it often feels very effortless or second nature. Beautifully captured.
A bit of a nitpick if you don't mind, it seems like the retouching was focused only on her face and nowhere else in the shot, such as the flyaway hairs, her chest, and the specks of lint/dust on her clothing. Having only the face looking close to perfect makes the other details that might need to be retouched stand out a lot to me, pulling focus from her face in a way the doesn't do this amazing portrait justice. I could be wrong and maybe you didn't do any retouching and instead her makeup is done really well, but either way there seems to be a very noticeable difference between the lack of flaws on her face and the supposed "flaws" that stick out to me throughout the rest of the image. Just my two cents.
DanielScott wrote:
If you have the eye for beauty and light, it often feels very effortless or second nature. Beautifully captured.
A bit of a nitpick if you don't mind, it seems like the retouching was focused only on her face and nowhere else in the shot, such as the flyaway hairs, her chest, and the specks of lint/dust on her clothing. Having only the face looking close to perfect makes the other details that might need to be retouched stand out a lot to me, pulling focus from her face in a way the doesn't do this amazing portrait justice. I could be wrong and maybe you didn't do any retouching and instead her makeup is done really well, but either way there seems to be a very noticeable difference between the lack of flaws on her face and the supposed "flaws" that stick out to me throughout the rest of the image. Just my two cents. ...Show more →
You are very right, thank you. I was only drawn to her face and misted her chest. One the other hand, I like flyaway hairs, and never remove them, and I think the roughness of her pullover suits the b&w image, but I should have removed some dust particles. I may add a more careful development.
Lovely ... but, I've got another set of nits to add in (similarly about selective editing).
Check the plane of focus, then compare the different areas. Looks like you might have some pretty strong "tells" going on with the PP. Take a look at how sharp her fingernails are, and her sweater cuffs. Take a look at her eyes and how sharp they are ... then there's all the stuff between those two planes that are smoothed over / soft. Your planes are going sharp/soft/sharp/soft ... which is an unnatural progression. Just something to be cognizant of.
Is your comment on the last image, or on both? On the last image on some parts of her face, OK. On the first image, I can see what you are saying on the cleavage of the second edit. Too much frequency separation on the cleavage. But the rest, facial skin, eyes, mouth, hands seem matching to me.
What would you recommend? To me her long and beautiful hands are an important part of the images, and I don't want to reduce sharpness on them.
BokehBeauty wrote:
Is your comment on the last image, or on both? On the last image on some parts of her face, OK. On the first image, I can see what you are saying on the cleavage of the second edit. Too much frequency separation on the cleavage. But the rest, facial skin, eyes, mouth, hands seem matching to me.
What would you recommend? To me her long and beautiful hands are an important part of the images, and I don't want to reduce sharpness on them.
Lots of data points, there ... I'd like to see the unedited ooc, so we could see the natural falloff. Then we could assess where you made the edits /manipulations ... and see how much they "tell".
I totally get editing to your storyline of significance for artistic liberty / rendering. I'm just saying, that you might want to watch your planes ... if you get too heavy handed on one plane, and don't compensate in the other planes, it can be a "tell" on your editing.
1st, it looks like the cuff is the most forward plane of focus in your ooc ... and things naturally get softer behind that plane. If you are going to edit to shift the plane of focus by sharpening the eyes (farther back), then I'd reduce the sharpness on the forwardmost plane, so it transitions as "less sharp" toward your newly established sharpness plane (eyes).
The other thing is that your eyes have a very "raccoon eyes" effect on the sharpening you applied to them, as the smoothing on the face > eyes sharpened is very abrupt (face smoothing > fingers also). If you want to make the eyes the sharpest plane by sharpening them, then do so ... working the amount of the other planes slightly less sharp as you move closer to the lens. OTOH, if you want to have them all to be in focus as a greater DOF, so the forward planes are approximately equal to the eye in sharpness ... that's fine, but you likely will want to use less "smoothing" on the face, in that case.
I think the easiest thing to do here (to your OP edit) is to reduce the sharpening on the eyes, and reduce the amount of smoothing on the skin that you have applied, so things don't have such an abrupt transition from sharp > smooth > sharp again. Couple that with some reduction in acuity to the forward most plane / cuff.
I mean, you've got sharp eyes, soft eyebrows, sharp cuffs, some parts of fingers sharp, others soft. Middle finger shows skin detail, in same plane as nose, but nose and cheeks are mushy soft with sharp lips. It's kinda all over the map, and the natural optic should have a progression to it associated with the distance / plane depth. I don't mean to sound overly critical, but I think it warrants a review of how your workflow is making decisions about the transitions between your selective edits ... particularly if your plane of focus isn't where you actually wanted it to be in the ooc.
It's a nice capture, but I think you missed focus, and have gone a bit overzealous in your edits to offset / over-compensate for that. Such adjustments are viable, but they take a bit more tedious care to coordinating the shifts in focal plane draw between amounts, locations and (rate of) transitions in edits.
