Candid Portrait, Overdone?

[l.k.madison]

I LOVE her eyes in that last edit, not a fan of the redness of her skin, but her eye tone is brilliant.

I agree with softening the skin a bit (maybe avoiding the action but adding a *slight* blur to the whole picture, then erasing her eyes out of that layer).

I'm no where close to being pro, my editing skills needs serious help but I do agree with the comment above, I would have taken the B/W route a long time ago, kudos for you to keep working with it until your completely happy with it.

Has she even seen the picture yet? You could always ask her what she'd like to change if she could change any part in it (aside from taking the braces off, haha)

[Katie_Belmont]

I took a turn at seeing how much I could correct the redness. This is what I ended up with.

[ctcook]

Would you mind telling me how you achieved these results?

[Katie_Belmont]

Oh gosh. I'll try to remember/explain it the best I can.

First I started by copying the layer. I used a layer mask to mask out all of her skin.
Then on the layer under that (where now only the skin is showing from) I adjusted the red balance a bit towards the cyan side to the point where it was toned down but didn't start looking blue yet. Then on the skin layer I turned the saturation down a bit. Then I took the paint brush on color mode, set it to a good skin color, turned the opacity down a lot, to like 15? and went over the skin once or twice until it looked like a natural skin color.
So at this point the only thing I've changed is the skin, the hair is still untouched.
Then I made another layer under the skin layer and sharpened and uped the saturation a little in the eyes (using a layer mask so that just the eyes were affected.
I used the same layer to blur the braces just a bit.
Then I combined all those layers into a new layer so it was back to one again and easier to work with.
I made a duplicate layer again and masked everything but the skin.
On the layer underneath I applied a surface blur to just the skin at a very very low value. I think it was a one.

Sorry if that's confusing. ><
Let me know if you need clarification on anything that I explained poorly.

[SherifG]

I see it some how over saturated..!