Shot using 580 EX II flash on full power bounced off ceiling slightly behind camera to light up face.
Histogram was really good even before PP - mostly on high side with NO blown highlights.
Used various Youtube tuts to do this.
Open, desaturate, adjust curves, high pass filter, make various layers - gausian blur, dodge and burn, sharpen, clone stray hairs, crop, resize, SFW
Post challenge:
Very happy with this finish. Thanks to everyone for the votes and comments!
Statistics
Place: 10 out of 97 Avg (all users): 6.3028 Avg (commenters): 8.2000 Avg (participants): 6.2444 Avg (non-participants): 6.3299 Views since voting: 1913 Views during voting: 319 Votes: 142 Comments: 8 Favorites: 1 (view)
My overall view is that this is a very strong portrait, which rightly did very well, hence the very justified high final score. Anything critical I have to say is, therefore, going to be strictly nitpicking, but here goes:
Technically: This should have a decent DOF with f6.4 at 50mm at this sort of range, but it looks remarkably shallow - her hair is perfectly focussed but the eyes seem just a tiny touch soft. If the hair wasn't perfect, I would think that this might be the result of re-sizing - you don't mention sharpening after resize, which I always find worthwhile as the sizing process plays hell with sharpness. The lighting is perfect with beautiful catchlights.
Artistically: I really like the framing of the face with the veil, particularly for the high key challenge it works really well. You clearly chose to stick with the 3rds convention and that it effective to. It wouldn't be fair of me not to finally give props to your model, who has given you a fantastic expression to capture here.
An excellent job, resulting in a pretty decent score.
I love this image for the the eyes that speaks. What helps this tremendously is the lines in the comp. You have the oval tilted head to the left and inside the oval the subtle triangle formed by the hairline and material covering her face. You have to go back to her eyes after tracing these lines...yet the frames goes down further below where there is more to be seen and for my taste, thats where I lose interest a bit. Although the darker shaded areas in the material helps to form other lines of interest it needs to be a bit tighter from bottom up. Im not sure about the processing on the nose or is it lighting
One other thing that has me wondering is the material covering her mouth and I dont know if it's my imagination but I can make out some teeth behind it through the holes. This looks odd. I could be wrong on this?
Processing in general is great and could not have done better myself. After having nit picked your image...I hope you will forgive me for overanalising an already great photo 7
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