colour and skin retouching?

[ShamJolimie]

hello, i'm new on dps and i'd like opinion on this shot. i used curves to get this black and white but i think it has a purple undertone. does anyone else notice it?
also, someone commented that i should make the skin smoother. are there other techniques than patch tool, clone tool. blurring is not an option.

[srt]

Hi, just wanted to say that this is a beautiful shot! Yes there does seem to be a slight purple tone, at least on my moniter. Which is not necessarily a negative. Also I think her skin looks fine, yes you can tell that she is real but I think thats a good thing! However I'm sure there are some other members that can recommend some good skin smoothing techniques. Great work

[BigFuzzy]

Fully agree with SRT.. I think it's fine the way it is. I absolutely HATE skin smoothing.. it's so fake to me. But that's a taste issue, so if you like it, do it. As for the blue/purple tone, you can use the exact same settings, but just drop the saturation down to 0, see if that does it, though i don't have a problem with this "split tone" portrait.

The one thing I noticed, is that the eye doesn't seem to be the sharpest part of the image, which I think it should be . Sometimes, some subjects eyes just never seem sharp, and this may be the case, but I'm thinking it's a case of using the center focal point as opposed to manual focus or "focus locking" on the left eye.

The lighting is quite nice in that it creates some nice shadows that create depth with the subjects. Are you able to use two lights? I ask because a rim/side light to make her stand out of the background (instead of blending in) I think would have been really nice.

All in all a nice, simple portrait of a beautiful subject. I think very little needs changing. Well done.

[ShamJolimie]

Thank you SRT, it's very encouraging.
Big Fuzzy, it's definitely true that the eyes should be the sharpest part. i'm still getting used to this 85mm lens, it's manual focus. for this i used a speedlight with beauty dish and reflector but i will try two lights next time. thank you so much for the feedback.

[sk66]

I don't really mind the purple tinge, but I think it might be better without it. I would use a "hue/saturation" adjustment to remove it.

I prefer a mild skin smoothing (as do most individuals being photographed). An easy way to do this is to duplicate the layer and do a gaussian blur on it, set the opacity to something relatively low and erase areas of desired sharpness (eyes etc).

[lputman]

What a beautiful portrait. I'm with the others and don't think the purplish undertone is a negative in this case. I'm curious as to how you obtained it though.