Head Shot

Before I delete this photograph, is there something "missing" from it?

The model is obviously beautiful, but there seems to be something

lacking.

Doug,

There are only a couple of things I can see that you might want to address. I would crop a little lower to get better top and bottom compositional balance. She needs a more engaging expression. It looks a little blah to me. She has good eye contact, but she seems somewhat disinterested. Everything else looks good to me.

Nice shot,

Mark

Wonderful portrait, Doug...my best

I think part of it is the skin tone and exposure, Easier to demonstrate than describe.

BTW, you posted this in some odd 'untagged color space' which may be giving you some problems.

Mark, thanks.  The purpose of us shooting together was to study the emotive qualities of her eyes, which she confessed needed to be strengthened.  I can't remember what thoughts we were focused on for this shot, but we would pick an emotion (frustration, anger, joy, empathy, etc), think about it, and shoot.   I think we'll be doing this again, so it will be interesting to see the differences between this, our first effort, and whatever else we come up with later on.  

Thanks Kallol

Les, I think her skin looks really good in your revision, but her hair looks green. That's easily fixed, though. What did you do?  And what do you mean by " odd 'untagged color space' "?

Yeah, the hair is green. I didn't bother to do the skin tone correction on a separate layer. Then I could have used a layer mask to 'paint back' the hair.

When I opened your JPEG in Photoshop, it looked truly horrible. PS reported that it was in an 'untagged RGB space', meaning it did not have an embedded profile. I tried a few likely suspects, and found that the original color space was likely sRGB (to which many cameras default). Somewhere along the line, the embedded profile got stripped.

Thanks, Les.  I'll check my procedure.  Using two installations of Photoshop on two computers separated by 20 miles is likely the cause.  They have different settings, I'm sure.  Also, the image was converted to CMYK for finishing, then converted to RGB when I Saved For Web.  So, I got some investigating to do....

Doug, I just couldn't help myself.  I had to play with this image.  I just meant to show you the crop I suggested but I also changed the expression, warmed the complexion and a couple of other twists.

Jerry

Your changes look good, Jerry, but in my opinion the best way to improve this shot is to put her in front of the camera again.  Darn it.  (not)