>>2885705>May I ask how did you do that ?Sure. Best I can recall, here's all I did:
(1) Fix WB.
(2) Fix exposure and white and black point issues. The whole picture was crazy soft and dull. At the beginning, I don't add too much contrast, (I save that for the end), but I want to get it closer so I can see what I'm working with.
(3) Slight boost to saturation in some of the channels. Even with fixed exposure it was still dull.
(4) General skin clean up with spot healing.
(5) Dodging and burning. Honestly, that's probably the most important thing you can learn for portrait editing. This shot didn't need a lot of burning, but it needed a ton of dodging, especially on chin, eyes, and lower forehead.
(6) I did some work on the eyes themselves, brightening them up, gently adding contrast, boosting the texture a bit, etc.
(7) I adjusted her makeup a tiny amount, since her skin was largely flat. Touches of gold to eye lids (to compliment eye color), tiny bits of rose to cheeks, pushed lips more salmon (to compliment skin tone).
(8) In addition to makeup, I did some general shaping of her face with broad dodging and burning: elevated cheek bones, evened out chin, shaped eyebrows, narrowed nose. All with just simple shadows.
(9) Cleaned up glasses. Gently added HP filter to frames.
(10) Added a high contrast/lower saturation vignette. (Just using a vignette tool almost always looks like garbage.) Don't think of vignettes as "dark" edges. Rather, think of vignettes as a way to draw the eye to the subject, however you need to do that. Here, she was soft, so using gradient masks to add contrast to the right and left of frame helps draw the eyes in.
(11) I split toned a tiny bit, because I still wasn't satisfied with the color. Blues to shadow, and yellow to highlights. The result isn't true color, but I think it works in this shot.
(12) Final adjustments for exposure and contrast. Took out a bit of the orange in her skin, since the final contrast boosted the color.
