Portrait Re-touching

Marcus Geezer

Marcus Geezer

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Marcus
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I'm in the mood for some C&C at the moment so thought I'd post this pic up to see what you good people on TP think. C&C welcome.

Info: Lighting is a lencarta single gridded softbox. Monoblock Lencarta elitepro600. Canon 5DMkII with 85mm 1.2L.

Processed in photoshop and lightroom.

Frankie by Marcus Charter, on Flickr

And here is the original...

Frankie Original by Marcus Charter, on Flickr
 
It's immediately obvious that it;s been retouched. Was that your intention? If not, you need to back off on any skin smoothing going on. How was it retouched? What methods were used?
 
All would be perfect somewhere in the middle between edit and original. Skin looks overdone, colors too cool. Forehead needed attention, but rest could be left nearly intact. Of course for my taste. Yours and yours customer's taste may differ. ;-)
 
BTW - great lighting.
 
It's interesting how I am receiving a mix of comments about the skin re-touching, some say it is too strong, some say just right. When completing this and regarding the opacity of skin smoothing layer, 100% was deffo too much, pulled it to about 80% then after a bit of pondering, went and made an espresso, came back adjusted it down to 70%, left it, went back, decided the skin tones were too uneven, changed again, left, etc. etc. and after an hour or two of leaving it and coming back decided on about 80%. More and tooo soft, less and too uneven. Possibly it could have been tweaked a touch down, but only a touch, even possibly a smidgen of a touch! Possibly I over did the forehead but other than the skin blemishes it is quite a smooth forehead I guess?

As for the colour tone, I wanted the cool look, I just think it suits the pic, but obviously not to everyones taste.

Basic process of re-touch was.... LR for basic tweaks then to PS for ..... Cloning ---> frequency separation method for skin work ---> dodge and burn ----> colour and tone control ----> hand painting in highlights to hair -----> selective sharpening and highlight boost.

And yes - the intent was for it to look re-touched.

Thanks everyone for the comments. Mucho appreciated.
 
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You see, thats the problem with posting up an original straight away for side by side comparison. I bet if you had posted up afterwards people would have been surprised at the original.

Anyway i love it Marcus, amazing what you can do with a raw file. I don't think the smoothing is over done at all, i can still see plenty of detail in the skin and no doubt when viewed at a larger size you can see even more. Good use of frequency separation.
Great skin tones and I love the cool almost cinematic toning.

My only crit, and i'm being picky is i would tidy up the bottom of his shirt where it opens slightly as my eye is drawn to it now ive noticed it, but thats all. Great work :)
 
Whether it's successful depends on what his intentions were: Was the retouching meant to be invisible or not.
 
doublemint76 said:
You see, thats the problem with posting up an original straight away for side by side comparison. I bet if you had posted up afterwards people would have been surprised at the original.

Anyway i love it Marcus, amazing what you can do with a raw file. I don't think the smoothing is over done at all, i can still see plenty of detail in the skin and no doubt when viewed at a larger size you can see even more. Good use of frequency separation.
Great skin tones and I love the cool almost cinematic toning.

My only crit, and i'm being picky is i would tidy up the bottom of his shirt where it opens slightly as my eye is drawn to it now ive noticed it, but thats all. Great work :)
Click to expand...

People argue over the benefit of RAW vs JPG. Certain types of shoots I know only to shoot JPG, such as schools, sports, but absolutely when it comes to this type of work it has to be a big RAW file as the starting point. I've found through experience that when starting off with a JPG that when you start pushing and pulling the sliders it can introduce quite early on noise, colour gradients, etc. For this type of work I'd love to be shooting medium format for the superior RAW files to start with, but alas I'm not quite that lucrative yet.

I've only just started using the freq sep method so still learning but love it over previous techniques. It's uncluttered to use and I think produces much better results.

Agree over the open shirt, should have spotted that, thank you Dan!

Pookeyhead said:
Whether it's successful depends on what his intentions were: Was the retouching meant to be invisible or not.
Click to expand...

As mentioned above I wanted this to look retouched, so the needle edges into the success area of the fail/success meter, but I'm not arrogant enough to think this is perfection, hence why I post and ask for C&C.
 
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