Only a touch of color...

[snowboy]

Cropped, greyscaled, back to rgb and colourized. Original taken with Nikkor 80-200 AFs @ 84mm, iso400, 1/60,f4.0.Raw, spot meter, shutter priority.
A bit of time spent on dodging and burning to lower the brightness on the veil (which distracts your attention away from the face.

[Bill C]

Very nice ... soft...I'll bet the larger version is superb. Kind of mysterious, wondering where she is looking...I also like the glow/lighting on the veil. What event did this young girl wear a veil for?
Regards,
Bill

[Igor]

That's a great portrait! Can you tell me how do you soft the corners?

[smunky]

I love it!
Beautiful portrait and young lady.

[snowboy]

Bill, this pic was taken in the church hall after she and several other children went for their first communion. I'm very happy with the way it worked, the expression, the glow...probably my favourite portrait so far. Although I do like the spontaneous pics like in my other post about 'candid portraits'.

Igor, the softness was done using Gaussian Blur in Photoshop.

Smunky, thanks.:cheers:

[HulaMike]

I also love Gausian Blur and then coming back with the History Brush. Very nice effect.

[snowboy]

HulaMike, I've never used the history brush. Can you tell me how it's used...?

[HulaMike]

Be glad to.

Let's say you added Gausian Blur to an image globally, it's now all blurred. Under "History" you'd check the last previous non-blurred state, or any other previous state, before you added the blur. That now becomes the reference point. Then you'd select the History Brush from the tool Palette. You'd then select the size of the history brush, mode and opacity from the docker on top of the screen. Running the History Brush back over any part of the image would then restore that part of the image to the previous state selected at the value selected. For a total return to a previous state, select 100%. For a partial or subtle blending of past and present states, select 5-50%.

It's easier than I make it sound and quite intuitive..I find it easier than using the lasso tool or masking primarily because I don't understand masking all that well.

PS: The History Brush can be used to retun to any previous state of your image, not just bluring. I often use it to "freeze" the history pallete in a particular state if I'm working on an involved, multi step image. (lots of cloning, burning, dodging, whatever) As you know, PS has a default of 20 steps in the history pallete. If you exceed that without making a dupe of a particular state you loose all previous state adjustments.

I tried to post an image earlier this evening using this technique but couldn't seem to upload the image. I'll try again. The title will be, "Flaming Breasts" just to get your attention. ;)

[Linda G]

A valuable tool, that history brush/palette! You can also make a new snapshot and have several images in the history palette to return to or use for your history brush and.....I'm not sure if there's a limit to how many you can make or not but I use it all the time in retouching. The healing brush makes great transitions under eyes but it obliterates everything. I use my history brush set on fourty percent and race over it to add back a little character. Control Y is the keyboard shortcut. <g> learn them!

[snowboy]

Now you've got me fascinated by this History Brush. I'm sure to be using it all over my shots!:)

[Don65Stang]

Snowboy,

Could you repost this picture?

Thanks,
Don