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 donāt feel I will get the real colors and brightness that I get on my calibrated screen for editing.
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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! Itās really appreciated. For me is difficult to improve my photography skills by myself without any feedback from someone. So Iām 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!
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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. Iām not sure if you got the memo, but all this damsel in distress business tends to be frowned upon these days.
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A tighter crop, only a slight retouch of the face and some work on the colors.
Free Raw Files - Tag @signatureeditsco DSC0317.nef.xmp (23.6 KB)
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Hmm, for me the color of the skin is too reddish/warm. The crop looks nice.
Interesting, for me the other edits look to cool. Maybe I should recalibrate my laptops display ā¦
Or I mine 
@Thomas_Do I am using dt 4.1 ā 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 plausibleā¦
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
I also used the eye initially for wb. But I changed the colors later to taste 
.
free.raw.signatureeditsco.DSC0317.jpg.out.pp3 (38.5 KB)
I know this is tagged for darktable, butā¦
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.
Interesting! What kind of retouch do yo do in Krita? Now that Iām confident using darktable, I want to learn other editing tools like Gimp. But I donāt know if itās necessary at all. Darktable is very powerful and almost everything can be done there. What would you like to have in darktable, so that you wouldnāt need to use Krita?
Nice edit! You seem to have forgotten the xmp file 
The above edit was done using RawTherapee, nothing else! RawTherapee only has a very basic spot removal tool, which made this a nice challenge 
I used that to get rid of some of the skin irritations/blemishes and I used a few Local Adjustments instances to deal with some of the other issues.
I normally have a different workflow that starts with RawTherapee and, often times, ends with Krita. Even though darktable has a rather nice set of retouching tools I still think that software like GIMP, Krita or Photoshop, to name just these three, are better suited to do serious retouching.
What I normally do in Krita? This is an old topic of mine, from over a year ago when I started using Krita: Krita: A worthy image retouching and compositing editor? It mentions some of the things I do. Not much different from what one would do in GIMP or PS. I feel a lot more comfortable using Krita nowadays, Iām certainly more proficient and learned some stuff. The exact workflow depends on the image and its often unique challenges.
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Hm, I think itās because of whitening additives in washing agents. These are more on the blue side of white or even convert uv light such that the white appears brighter. You can observe this with washing powder glowing under uv light. This will mess up any reasonable colour calibration as the usual models tend to fail here.
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Hereās my contribution to the variety of approaches.
Free Raw Files - Tag @signatureeditsco DSC0317_06.nef.xmp (59.4 KB)
I am very sorry for my rude and unnecessary āopinionsā, being old enough not to do this while on a tequila rampages. I apologize.
pretty woman. she reminds me a bit of claire forlani.
tag @signatureeditsco DSC00121.ARW.xmp (12.0 KB)