An okay rescue?

[Jonathan Evans]

So I took this photo of my wife in her chinese new year dress against a dark background and the flash I had set as a hair light failed to fire (faulty receiver unit). I liked the connection with the camera though and have tried to rescue it as best I could:

Before:



After:



What I did:

1) In ACR, adjustments were made to white balance, exposure increased by 0.85, fill light of 30, blacks of 1. Other sliders left at default values.
2) In Photoshop background layer copied twice and skin smoothed by applying a high pass filter to one layer and some Gaussian Blur applied to the other layer.
3) Curves adjustments made to the whites of eyes/teeth and the browns of her eyes.
4) Gamma correction of 0.85 made using an exposure adjustment layer.
5) Curves adjustment to her hair.
6) Levels adjustment layer, white point adjusted to 246
7) Wife masked out and two texture layers painted in to change background.

I have probably made this way more complicated than is needed, but I am still finding my way around photoshop and was experimenting a lot.

Any comments/criticisms about the changes are most welcome.

Thanks for looking,

Jonathan

[BigFuzzy]

The edit is much much better, I think that's obvious.

The only critcism I have is that the whites of the teeth and eyes have that "over whitened" look to me. It's actually the first thing I noticed.

Other wise it's a very good recovery.

Oh, not a criticism, but I don't get the rusty metal background.. doesn't seem to fit the image to me. I get the need to want some texture, that's a good decision, but rust?

EDIT: On second look..yeah, the eyes/teeth waaay too bright.

[Jonathan Evans]

Hi Big Fuzzy,

Thanks for the feedback. The teeth have been whitened using an adjustment layer, so that will be an easy fix. As for the texture, well, it was the only one I had at hand...I should really go and source some more I will fix the teeth and background and repost a bit later.

Thanks again for the feedback.

Jonathan

[Zabet]

I agree with the background issue. The dress itself is beautiful but the background distracts from it.

[Jonathan Evans]

Hi all,

I have gone back and reduced the brightness of the teeth/eyes and introduced a much more subdued texture to the background. Better?



Thanks again for looking.

Jonathan

[Tzetsin]

When you brightened the photo you lost some contrast to the dress. Try bumping up the saturation in a layer for just the dress to bring some of that color back. Just a touch mind you, too much and it will look bad