>>3185287Soft lighting from a large light source. The image you compare it to later is lit by a close beauty dish, plus the model has highlight in the other image to bring shine to her cheekbones. This woman is extremely beautiful with perfect skin. That kind of woman still exists today, just hard to come by. They were also rare in the olden days. If you ever work with super-high end models, they have practically perfect skin naturally, and combined with a good makeup artist they can look photoshopped in real life.
>>3185344Personally, I do find my edits more visually appealing than the originals. Appreciate the feedback.
>>3185347The highlights and shadows have flat contrast. The blacks have crushed details, with lower contrast around the edges of the frame. The midtones have most of the detail and contrast. You can do this with luminance masking curve adjustment layers. The highlights don't go anywhere near pure white if you look at the histogram. The shadows and highlights are desaturated (hue/sat adjustment layer to desaturate, then use "blend-if" sliders to control the value range it targets). The darker midtones are cool blue, but due to the contrasting warm tones in the skin look slightly green. (selective color adjustment layer). The red lipstick contrasts with the hue in the rest of the image (was planned for the shoot). Soft dark vignette. The overall saturation is unified (saturation masked hue/sat adjustment layer to desaturate the more saturated areas, then mask from the lips). The saturation is contained primarily in the skin and lips.
I don't have any quick method to create this, just lots of small adjustments confined to specific value ranges.
>>3185370Nice job. There's some green in the highlights that could be neutralized.
>>3185460I like the overall dark moodiness - makes the reflections stand out. Some sharpening after the resizing would have improved it.
