RAW to Jpeg Conversion in Adobe RAW 4.2, Clone Tool, Smudge Tool, Spot Healing Brush, and Blur Tool to Minimize Wrinkles in the face and neck areas, Duplicate and Convert to Black & White, Sepia Filter, Luminosity Blending, Adjusted Opacity, Stamp Visible, Adjusted Color Skin Tone, Duplicated Layer with Overlay Blending & Reduced Opacity, Enhanced Saturation of Green & Red Channels, Merged Visible, Resized, Duplicated Layer, Auto-Sharpened @ about 50% Opacity, Merged Visible, USM, Quick Selection Tool to Isolate the Background, Guassian Blur, Deselect, Cropped, Saved for Web...
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Place: 160 out of 175 Avg (all users): 4.6641 Avg (commenters): 0.0000 Avg (participants): 4.5273 Avg (non-participants): 4.7632 Views since voting: 738 Views during voting: 241 Votes: 131 Comments: 1 Favorites: 0
Composition
Great crop for the portrait, and an unusual facing of the subject, it worked very well not to make it so classic looking.
Technique
Three things that harm your photo, and two of them are easily solved: there should be more light on the face, since it's a bit shaded (this is the difficult part without external lighting, you need to choose carefully the time of day to shot, so you can have the sun in the face, reflectors are inexpensive and good for this), but you could have set a higher shutter speed (1/60 causes blurring if you shake just a bit) and lower the ISO (400 is a lot, and the grain shows).
Processing
Maybe because of the compression, there are a lot of jpg artifacts around the hair and face, it's not very sharp because of that. Also, the try to soften the skin resulted in marks across her face, and just on one side. Face smoothing plugins do the trick much better.
Also, there's a lot of noise on the right side of her face, that must be addressed too.
Overall
The small amount of blur and the compression really hurt this shot, but with some adjustments in the settings of the camera and careful planning for the lighting this is a composition that has potential.
If you have any questions feel free to contact me.
Regards,
Joao
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