martine Angel face

Comments appreciated :)

great and delicate B&W...Fantastics eyes!!!!!

What wonderful eyes! I love how the sharpness of the eyes contrast with the softness of the rest of the photo.

 

I'd love to know more about how you do this (mine never come out this well)!

Wonderful photo.

Wow, what an amazing portrait. Great job!

Here you go again. Beautiful.

Very good og veldig bra..:)) as always your photos are an inspiration to try to capture this motive...i cant..you can:)) thanks for sharing..beautiful kid and vell captured as always.. --willy--

Indeed Angel face.

Fantastic EOS 20. How is it? Good balance and great definition.

And her eyes are beautiful...

Lovely clarity --

Beautiful portrait.

I'm going to have to go against the grain and assert that the eyes are overly-sharp, and too un-natural. My first impression was that of muppet-eyes. You have a good idea, but the results of this effort are quite strange.

If you're going for natural...eyes a bit freaky. If you're going for unsettling & weird... eyes perfect. D.

Thank you all for your comments!

I'm off to work now, but I'll pop in and answer your questions later today.

 

Here's another version that I guess some of you will like better :)

http://www.eyesondesign.net/pictures/martine/martine_haralokka3b.jpg

Ok - finally some time to answer some questions (boss is out in a meeting... hehehe)

 

Tom F: How to explain how I do this... I basically resized and sharpened the image and turned it into b&w using 3 different hue/saturation layers. To learn more about how I convert the pictures into b&w look here: B&W tutorial.

To get the soft look this time I've used the diffuse glow filter (white background color). I duplicated the picture with the adjustmentlayers to a new top layer by creating a new layer on top, then pressing down the alt key while going to Layers - Merge all. On that top layer I added a Filter - Diffuse glow - settings (if I remember correctly) 0-2-14. Then I duplicated that layer and did a Filter - Blur - Gaussian Blur - 8 pixels. Then set the layer mode for that layer to Soft and dragged down the opacity to about 50%. On the first posted image here (the original) I then used the Eraser tool (with a low opacity) to get some sharpness back on the eyes.

Hope this helped a little :)

 

Piero Cruciatti: I've actually returned the 20D to the shop I bought it. Appeared I'd gotten a lemon and the camera locked up on me several times in addition to lots of other wierd stuff happening. I'm very pleased with the image quality on the few pictures I was able to take before returning the camera though, and the speed compared to the 10D was just - wow.

 

Sooo... Even though I know lots of people are thrilled with their new 20D the difficulties I had kind of killed the excitement of getting a new camera, so instead of getting a new 20D I'm now waiting for the new 1Ds mark II to arrive (yeah I know - I've gone completely mad :D But hopefully I'll be happy with the choice I've made (and totally broke... hehehe)

 

Thanks again for all the great critiques. I really appreciate it :)

 

:) Nina

wonderfully done: the glow and little blur make your daughter a real angel

Wow!! Thanks for sharing your portrait tips! I'm gonna try some of your techniques. I usually select out the cheeks and forehead and copy them to a new layer and do a Gaussian blur to remove blemishes, then I add noise to match the rest of the photo. Then I set the opacity to about 50 on my new blurry layer.

I'm not sure the word "perfect" is adequate enough to describe your photographs.

Nice! Very Nice!!!

Nina This is a lovely portrait, one angel. I am a great fan of you and your pictures. Thanks for sharing // Per

Beautiful portrait!

Nice image, the eye to eye contact is pleasing and yet there is something odd about the expression. Maybe I am catching some sort side effect of to much PS correction and or special effects being done on the image to the point it borders on unnatural or surreal. In any case she will break quite a few hearts when she grows up.

Hei dette var bra!

CaNNoT find a CoMMeNt. Excellent :-)

Nina, I love your work. I am sending you an e-mail.