Reply To: In need of comments & critiques.

[ebi]

Sorry to interrupt your wonderful conversation but you posted in the section: “Am I A Fauxtog?” Sorry to say, this is the work of a fauxtog.

Aside from the really boring poses in your seniors album, they are way way way overdone. I’d love to see the unretouched versions of these. I’m guessing that the images were in a much better place before this hack job on the retouching. It’s hard to tell, really.

most of the images of the white girl are overexposed. The eyes are horrendous. You need to undo whatever it is you did.

The darker girl (shall I call her orange?) are exposed better but then you messed it all up in the retouching.

You said:

but now that I think of it, I may try to just do several layers at a lower opacity to try to give it a more natural smoothness.

no don’t do that. Just clone out the larger bumps at 100% opacity, very carefully. wrinkles and smaller bumps require a more advanced technique that I don’t think you’ll be quite able to grasp at the moment and is a bit difficult to explain. I would suggest that you just live with those imperfections for now until you are able to get a better handle on photoshop.

As for her eyes, I won’t lie, I did it on purpose. I like how it kind of draws you there, but after a few of them, I started toning it down some, and got to a point where there was a perfect subtlety to it in a few of them.

There is no perfect subtlety to the eyes at all. They don’t draw you in. They make you look like a bad photographer. If you need brighter eyes, then someone needs to kick light into the eyes with a reflector or you need to find the light. You’ve done it with other images.

They were already beautiful to begin with.

Then why fuck with the images? You aren’t doing those girls any justice.

so I still have time to redo some things editing wise if I need to.

Yes. You need to. There is no question about it. And if you took money from her, you should give it back unless you intend on improving vastly by your next session.

you may be asking yourself right now, “Am I reading his tone correctly”?

Yes, you are. In reading your comments, I get the opinion that you are trying to appear humble but you really think that your images are great. They aren’t. Your skin tones are whack. white girl is totally pink in so many images. orange girl just has so many issues. You should take both down. The other galleries are ok. They suffer from a lot of the same issues and retouching abuse as the senior portraits. Everything pretty much looks like it’s shot on a Point and shoot circa 2001.

http://www.imagesbyamanfredi.com/#!untitled/zoom/c1kou/imagej3h – zombie baby is coming to eat your brains.

http://www.imagesbyamanfredi.com/#!untitled/zoom/c1kou/image4pz – this image looks like it was a horizontal shot or a wider vertical and you cropped everyone else out of the frame. Even if you didn’t, it’s still a bad crop.

I like this image though – http://www.imagesbyamanfredi.com/#!untitled/zoom/c1kou/image12s4