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Quick edit for a photo for a CV


L

Lyudmila Valcheva

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Hello dear people,

I will be very grateful, if someone could edit my picture for my CV.
I don't want much, just to make my face a bit smoother and to edit my hair a little bit, because it sticks out.
Also if you could do something with the background, something like a shadow for example, so it would have a 3D effect, that would be awesome, but not necessary.

Thanks,
Lucytazi.JPG
 
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I found the variety of techniques displayed here (and especially, the subtle differences between results) quite interesting. I also thought that the immediate participation of so many members in this thread shows that portrait retouching is clearly a strong interest of many of our members.

To allow for more convenient comparison between the various results, I stacked and aligned them, and from that, made a looped, annotated GIF animation . To clearly show the pore structure in the subject in a reasonable GIF file size, I cropped, but did not down-rez the images. This means that the GIF file is still larger than usual (around 6 megs instead of the usual couple of hundred kB for the usual small static images we see) and won't play in the forum's attachment preview window, but rather, you will have to click on it and/or download it to get it to play and see all the frames.

As a bit of editorializing, be sure to take note of the abrupt transitions to over-smoothed areas in some of the images. Also, as I'm sure everyone is aware, the choice of which features to minimize and which to let stand is a critical decision for retouchers and we see a good variety of thoughts on this subject in this exercise.

Another factor to consider is the final size the image will be viewed at. If it's only going to be seen as a small image at very low resolution, a lot of the choices become moot and only large scale aspects of it become relevant, eg, overall color correction, fly-away hairs, shiny areas, etc.

Enjoy!

Tom M

PS - BTW, I suspect there is a user of Portrait Pro in this group, LOL.
 

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  • tazi-compare_PSG_versions-ps05a_move_rotate_crop-8bpc-for_GIF-annotated.gif
    tazi-compare_PSG_versions-ps05a_move_rotate_crop-8bpc-for_GIF-annotated.gif
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I'm curious, Lyudmila, other than straightening out the slight tilt in the original, can you tell us which aspects of the various versions do you like the most, and which aspects don't you like? As a pseudo "customer" having this sort of feedback would be very helpful to the individuals who contributed to this thread.

Cheers,

Tom M
 
If @chrisdesign sees this thread, it will be very interesting to hear what thinks about the various contributions. Maybe he will even be so kind as to show us how he would apply the frequency separation technique to this image. I suspect that one of the participants used this technique, so it will be interesting to see the differences.

Tom M

PS - I realize you were joking about "cheating", Ged, but there are many high volume portrait mills that simply don't bring in enough revenue per image to be able to individually retouch each portrait, so to them Portrait Pro and similar programs are god-sends: Reasonable, but not great results, with a final product delivered very quickly.

For example, imagine having to manually retouch the dozen or so pimples on the yearbook photos of every member of a high school graduating class. I would go stark raving mad if I was stuck with that job, and because the final pix are only printed an inch or so high, the parents will never know if PP doesn't give quite as good results as individual, manual retouching.

Personally, I always find it interesting to see what the latest version of that program can do and compare it to manual retouching.
 
I know is not a contest but in this case if i have to choose i like rich54 the most, mostly because the color correction and skin detail.

Cheers!
 
Tom Mann said:
If @chrisdesign sees this thread, it will be very interesting to hear what thinks about the various contributions. Maybe he will even be so kind as to show us how he would apply the frequency separation technique to this image. I suspect that one of the participants used this technique, so it will be interesting to see the differences.

Tom M

Thanks Tom
I try to post my version later today.
Regards Chris
Click to expand...
 
Hey, Argos - I agree with you and some of the other posters who also felt that the skin in the image she posted definitely needed some correction.

The problem is that since none of us have never seen Lyudmila in person or seen any other pictures of her, we really don't know if her true skin color is more of a yellow or a red hue, nor do we know the true degree of saturation of her skin color.

Anyway, FWIW, I tried my hand at it, as well. Most of my time was spent on the shadowing of her face and getting some highlights in her hair, but I also worked on removing part of the yellow of her face, but adding back a bit of red in selected areas (eg, her cheeks and chin). Only she will be able to tell us which version has the best color, and even that assumes she is looking at these samples on a colormetrically accurate, hardware calibrated monitor, not some cheap laptop.

BTW, I must confess that didn't feel like dealing with her hair for this little exercise, so I used Rich's version of her hair -- I hope you don't mind, Rich. Thank you!

Tom M
 

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  • tazi-tjm01-ps06a_16bpc_bz-etc-02.jpg
    tazi-tjm01-ps06a_16bpc_bz-etc-02.jpg
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Great job Tom, i agree with you, but whitout knowing her skin colour as you say, i usually dont go for too much yelow (speaking in general not for your image) in a indoor (studio), flash light.
Nice work with the sharperning, is ps or you use a diferent program/aplication?

Cheers!

Edit: Nice touch with the black around the irish never used it and i like it, i'm lookin right now pictures of eyes in google and maybe a little more blur is the normal and realistic i'm going to pratice, really like it XD.
 
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Yup, all done in PS. Believe it or not, I used the relatively new anti-shake tool for the sharpening. It takes some finesse to get that tool to work without producing horrible results (and on some images I can never get it to work), but when it does work, the results can be stunning. I also like and use "Focus Magic" (a very old plugin) quite a bit for sharpening at the few pixel level, and probably only use USM and the remaining native sharpening tools less than 1/3rd the time these days.

WRT the black circle around her irises, if I've got some time, sometimes I throw in little touches like that (a) just for fun and to see if anyone is really looking closely at what I did, LOL; and (b), to add a bit of variety when doing little exercises like this by trying something new and crazy, LOL. To be honest, I'm surprised anyone spotted it.

In this case, there was already a less pronounced circle around her irises, so I thought I would see how it would look if I emphasized it even more. I think it's too much, but I knew it wouldn't really matter in a little exercise like this.

T
 
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Nice chris, like the colour, but i think you add colour noise instead of monocromatic for texture maybe? XD
 
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