Going ultra natural this time.

Sorry in the delay in getting this and post #10 up. Life has been fairly busy, and what time I have had has been filled with motivation gained from #cleaningtiktok ^{beware of cleaningtiktok.} Oof.

I heard about this photographer – Alexander Croft – through one of the TPF groups that I’m in on Facebook, and I instantly fell in love with this image. Yulia looks like she’d be such a blast to be around, and I think her smile is super cute (and oh, what wonderful, wild hair)!

I tried super hard to stay as natural as possible while editing this image. It was also my first image using CaptureOne (which I’m still learning but liking a lot so far). There was a lot of challenges with it – and not all of them have I figured out how to rectify. Carrie Beene gave some really great tips on how to fix it (I’ve been pulling the curves too much, and so it’s been shifting some colours) – and I’ve put these into use in image #10.

I am still trying to get an eye for skin tones – in the previous version of this image Carrie pointed out that I’d made Yulia’s chest just a slight bit too pink. I’ve gone in and fixed it, so hopefully it looks better. What do you think? If you were retouching this image, what would you fix in way of colour and skin tones?

Aside from that (and fixing the bra straps that bugged me), I also played around more with the colour wheel / complementary colours. I shifted her eyeliner to a more blue colour, and increased the saturation, and decreased the saturation of the overpowering orange background. I’m not too sure how visible that is in your browser though.

Anyhow, time to stop waffling on. Please leave a comment on what you’d do differently, as well as what you like and dislike about my edit. I’d love to hear from you.

^{Sidenote: I recently joined Real Retouching : learn and teach on Facebook, saw the names in the group and very nearly fled the group there and then. They seem like a totally awesome bunch though, and it’s great to get feedback from the big guys!}