C&C Welcome, second

[Toothtek]

[rpcrowe]

Nice portrait of a lovely woman. I am, however, not really keen on the flat side placement of her left hand as it seems to show the hand as boxy with stubby fingers...

[Shadowman]

Nice effort, not so keen on the crop of the hand, head, and shoulders.

[Manfred M]

Another stunning image, Mitch.

Some of the same comments I made on your previous post regarding position of the lights, eye size, etc. apply here too. I suspect that a reshoot is not going to happen, so I'm going to suggest a couple of tweaks to consider in post. I've applied a few of them in this edited image.





Comments on the hands and especially on the cuts at / near the joints I would have to agree with. Tough call sometimes and even here the "rules" about not cutting on a joint, but rather ahead of it are sometimes a bit of a tradeoff. I might also do something to cut out the strap camera right, but again, the fix may be compositionally worse than leaving it in.

1. Your portrait is neutral to slightly blue. I tend to bias my portraits slightly to the warm (usually yellow / orange) side. I just find that people look better if one errs of the warm side by just a touch. I upped the red and yellow by 10 units each. I'm not totally happy with the way it looks, but suspect that the original WB might be the reason why. I find that I need to do this step during my RAW conversion, otherwise it doesn't quite work properly.

2. I have no issues cropping part of the head / hair, but pay attention to where the crop occurs. My crop is "rule of thirds", with both eyes on a horizontal third and the left (camera right) eye on the vertical third. I find that this often strengthens the composition.

3. Shine reduction - I don't do darker skin a lot, but find that it is less forgiving when it comes to glare and reflections than lighter skin does, so I did a minor reduction in these highlights. Just as an aside; I find myself fighting this in my own work and have not found a great solution either, so I'm open to suggestions here. I used a piece of software called "Shine Off" that a former site moderator directed me to.