A little on retouching

OK, so I guess this post is going to be a little bit of one of those games, "what's different in the photos" - but here goes. I've been taking Scott Kelby's class on digital retouching over at Kelby Training and thought I'd follow along with an image I shot. As most of my portraits are on my other hard drive, all I had is this image of Laura (one of my most favorite people ever, even if she'll hate me for posting this.)

Retouching is something that is very subjective, and I'm still feeling out learning the process, but I basically tried most of the techniques out here. I've also learned a lot about retouching from Lee Varis' book Skin.

Oh, also, I just picked up the book "Real World Nikon Capture NX" - so I can learn how to use Capture NX (it came with the D300). I am not dissatisfied with Lightroom as a RAW converter, but if the images do indeed look better, I'm all for it.

Anyway, onto Laura, before and after.







Here's one more. What? You didn't know my sister had blue eyes? Funny, neither did my mom...