It is sad to see @7osema attacked for asking questions about how to edit a photograph. There was no need for anyone to make a judgement call based upon his request. I once edited a picture of my son after he passed away. In the picture he had some pimples because he was a teenager. I decided to remove these pimples to remember him how he normally looked or he looked in my memory. Woman often take selfies with phones and apply filters to get the look they want. Woman often apply makeup to get the look they want. What right does anyone have to get on here and make such rude comments when someone asked for advice about editing.
I have downloaded this image and will try and take a look at how I would edit it and provide some requested feedback.
I havent look at the xmp, so I’m only going to comment on the jpg posted. I would clone out the blue/red stuff in the back wall. It is too distracting. I would also do a closer crop and more centered between left and right. I would try to boost up the either the local contrast or sharpness around the eyes (mask only on the eyes), since they look too soft in my opinion. I would try to smooth the skin color below the neck line since it looks to have some dark patches, but dont over do it. I dont love the crease on the shirt in the right side, but there is nothing you could do about that.
On the contrary (to the first reaction), the portrait is an excellent vehicle for retouching exercises. Skin can be difficult to work with. While it can be misused in a disrespectful, uninspired or careless manner, unless we are aiming for candidness or producing a passport photo, retouching skin is a very normal thing to do.
If inclusion, diversity and equity are of concern, do find more subjects for @7osema and the rest of us to explore! I know one of the tags was critique: I would like to remind people that it means constructive or artistic criticism!
The only change I would make is to lighten the skin a bit more with a bit more contrast and darken the background so that the light wall doesn’t stand out as much:
(Clarification re: @s7habo’s take.) To me, the lightening is pushing it. The background darkening or dulling works great. The issue may be less glaring in a colour image, but if you take away the colour, the face is over bright. My phone has this bedtime mode (currently active) that grey scales the screen.
Also, with the wider ongoing discussion (in more diverse societies) on the appropriateness of skin lightening, in particular, the elevation of lighter skin over darker tones, it can be a sensitive subject.
Hi @7osema, I thought you did a reasonably nice job with the retouch tool in Darktable. It is only personal taste, but I found your skin tone choice a little warmer than I like. Feel free to disagree.
I have done an edit myself. I opened the image in Darktable and set the exposure module to +2.0 EV. I then went to filmic an in the scene tab clicked on auto tune levels. I then created a second instance of exposure and drew a path mask around the face, hair and part of the shirt. I inverted the mask and darkened the background by -0.8 EV to alter the lighting of the scene so it looked like skylight was falling on the girl. I then lifted the colors by selecting the ‘basic colorfullness: natural skin’ preset in the color balance rgb module. I applied sharpening by selecting the sharpen demosaicing (AA filter) in the diffuse or sharpen module. I forgot to apply the default values of denoise (profiled) which I do with most of my images. Luckily this image is not noisy. Since, I personally do not like using the retouch module in Darktable I exported the image as a 16bit Tiff file.
I then opened the tiff file in Gimp. I used the healing tool in GIMP to remove unwanted blemishes on the skin. I find the healing tool in GIMP is very quick for this sort of work and photo restoration. I then duplicated the layer and applied some sharpening to the new layer using the unsharp mask. This makes the hair, lips, eyes, eyebrows etc look sharper. However, I masked over the skin to keep the softer look for the skin. I flattened the layers of the image and cropped out distracting background elements to focus the viewers attention to the girl. However, some stickers on the wall in the background were distracting so I used the clone and healing tool to remove them. I hope you like my edit, but I welcome constructive criticism and alternative viewpoints.
Thanks for your feedback. The shirt is dominant in all version of this picture. How would you tackle subduing it? I could desaturate the shirt maybe? BTW, the image has rendered a little darker and tiny bit bluer when posted than on my editing screen. So I will try and add another screen grab, but I don’t feel I will get the real colors and brightness that I get on my calibrated screen for editing.
Is this the screen grab or a new take? It looks good. As in, it feels retouched, not reinterpreted, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I think a little desaturation would do. I would have to break it apart to see what I would do. Right now, I am just an armchair critic, but hopefully got you all thinking some more. Ha ha.
Thanks for your feedback! It’s really appreciated. For me is difficult to improve my photography skills by myself without any feedback from someone. So I’m really happy that this forum exists.
@Terry , @s7habo You are right. After looking at your edits I noticed that my edit seems very flat and skin tone was not very realistic.
@afre Thanks for your support and the very interesting article that you linked!
I still had the image opened in GIMP and I used curves to raise the brightness and remove a little of the blue to better match what is posted to the web to what I saw on my editing screen. It is still not a perfect match, but I hope my editing approach gives food for thought.
I try to do most of my editing in Darktable but sometimes I finish off in GIMP because tools like its healing tool are very fast and easy to use. I know the retouch tool in Darktable is a very clever module, but it can be very resource intensive and slow to work with when there are a lot of spots to work on.
I also love the masking options in Darktable and it can allow you to relight the scene like I have done here. I wanted to darken the background to draw the viewer to the face. But I agree that the shirt is distracting. As a photographer I might want the model to wear different clothes to really focus on her face. Dark clothing can be very effective for this. However, this post was about editing and so I gave it a shot. I did lighten the top of her shirt to match the lighting on the face. Maybe I should have left the shirt dark?
Where I live, half the professional photographers, especially in the event/wedding department, are women. Pretty much all of them are great at retouching. In fact, one of the best books on retouching with Photoshop was written by an actual woman, her name is Katrin Eismann. You can look her up. She educated millions of women on retouching photos.
Personally, I expect the model in question to be perfectly capable making her own call on the photographer retouching her photo. I’m not sure if you got the memo, but all this damsel in distress business tends to be frowned upon these days.
@Thomas_Do I am using dt 4.1 — my first attempt was to whitebalance the girl, using one of the white (?) stripes of her blouse. The result was terrible!!! (Hm. wonder why?)
Next attempt, using the white of her left eye, became more plausible…
Editing an image like this I would normally do the basics in RawTherapee and continue with the rest, mainly the retouching, in Krita. So I was curious what I would be able to do using just RawTherapee.
This was a fun exercise.
EDIT: Noticed and fixed an issue with the blue/white shirt.
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