Portrait Myself and I

[sunallnight]

This is a raw picture, not meaning unedited but that it shows a raw emotion of myself. This is a self portrait as well.

Critiques- anything in general that you would like to say but mostly the thing i questioned about the picture was the contrast in the hair.. how to get rid of it, as well with what is behind the head. but any reflections or help would be great

[Niresangwa]

nice blue tones, if a little oversaturated, but as an overall look, it works. depending on the software youre using, removing the fluff in the BG would be as simple as a little cloning. while you have the cloning brush out, work on those hot areas on the brow, a little healing would go a long way. why do you want to lose the contrast in the hair? in any case some layer masking could be used there. i'd probably suggest desaturating the blue channel a little then re-working on the eyes - they work well..moreso if you get the WB right on the whites of the eyes... but the bordering-on-neon shirt is a little much

[MrJones]

I feel there is way too much blue in the picture.
the eyes are too bluish and doesn't feel natural and the shirt just screams out, plus you have blue tones in your skin face which bothers me.
even the background got a bit of blue on the left
try dialing down the blues in the photo, i think it will look better.

[avishek24]

I agree with the others that the color blue is a little too prominent in this picture. The overall image would look better if you could reduce that a tad and maybe selectively let the blue in your eyes remain with a slightly higher saturation than the rest of the pic (i.e. leave it how it is now).

[sk66]

I'd tone it down a little, especially the blue shirt and red...

I did an edit using mostly the burn tool to darken the shirt/background...a saturation adjustment layer and a b/w layer...I think it came out very nice. I'll attach it if they get that function fixed.

BTW, beautiful eyes..

[peeperita]

your eyes are expressive enough to carry the raw emotion.....the blues are just a bit too much.....especially how they're intruding into the whites of your eyes and making your blonde hair green.....

i too had a go at it in editing.....just for my own fancy since i found it so arresting.....i used a more conventional treatment to clean up your skin and whites of your eyes from all that saturated blue.....using lthe color channels......but, you could also use levels or curves....whichever you feel more comfortable with.....

i also addressed your hair with just a selection of it set to screen and then toned down.....that brought more of it to the light.....i did that to your eyes too....they seemed to need a bit more light too.....

with your permission, i'd love to show it to you because i think you make a stunning model and your original image so intrigued me.....

peeper

[sunallnight]

I would love to see all of your edits! I just downloaded the program and would love to see your takes on the editing, i too agree about the blues; thank you all.

[RLucas]

First of all, I am going to agree with Niresangwa, and say that I really like the blue tones in this image, but it does need to be toned down a bit.
I use GIMP, but you can probably translate this to PS pretty easily.
First I made a duplicate layer and set the white and black points. I set the black point with the dropper tool on the left side of the image, and set the white point on the white of your left eye. This created a shadow down the right side of your face that I found rather pleasing, and added to the mood of your expression. It did however make the colors, especially the skin tones go too saturated with red and yellow. To correct I created a duplicate layer and desaturated to grayscale using the using the luminocity option. I then changed the layer mode to soft light, which toned the skin back down. I then merged the soft light layer down.
I created new duplicate layer, and adjusted the curves in each color channel to balance everything back out, but it looked too sterile, and lost the nice blue undertones.
So I used a script designed for GIMP, called ProviaFX, which simulates the look of Provia film, and I was able to get that nice blue tone back. I am sure there is something similar available for PS.
I hope you like it! I will take it down if not. I love the expression and the composition of this image!



sp edit by RLucas2009, on Flickr

[Life in Motion]

would you care to post the straight out of camera shot...i'd love to have a play with it.......i messed with your posted one a little and i think it could be a beautiful portrait done with a clean edit.......but much better without messing with correcting the blue tint...

ETA: here's my correction of your color version but my guess is it could be a lot easier starting over and not trying to pull the green and blue out of the picture before doing a clean edit.......and then thought pic looked great converted bw.....

[sk66]

The attachment feature is still broken so I uploaded a copy to flickr..I'll take it down shortly.


In some ways, I think my edit isn't as good as your's when it comes to being "raw". Your's is much redder and has more of the askew hair which gives more of a feeling of having been crying or something. BTW, I also did a WB correction not mentioned in my previous post.