hi kind of new to this whole GIMP image doctoring stuff. i have been messing around with some of my friends facebook profile pics and thought i would see if i could get some unbiased feedback

also if anyone has any good advice on how to properly remove irritating light flares like the one that cuts across the girls face in the first image?
( i basically just took a portion of hair from the opposite side of her face and blended it in!)

Looks like you have done a pretty good job to me, as to removing the light flare from the hair, there is a tool in gimp called the clone tool, you select a brush and set the size required then position brush over the image on the part of the drawing you want to use then click ctrl key to lock that position, then move your mouse to where you want to paint over and it will use the part of the image you cloned earlier.

I like how her eyes turned out. They are very sharp and bright, compared to the rest of the image. I would like to see the gloss on the lips retained from the original image though. Lip color is good, I see you took liberty of changing it to a different shade. Something about shiny lips is always better for some reason though.

Overall, I think you went a tiny bit too far with the smoothing. Skin can be tricky to work with, since the eye is trained to overlook tiny blemishes, and when skin is paper smooth it looks wrong. Same with hair, there is too much going on in hair to have smooth surfaces like this. The eye expects there to be strands and highlights, deep shadows, etc.

There is a tutorial here in the tut section that works with a plug in for just this kind of thing. I've played with it a little to see the effect in action. It really works. You might consider giving it a try. I give it 3 thumbs up.

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=3518

All in all, your retouch looks a lot better than my first attempt at friends photos. I always like to weave them into spider webs or some such. I'm sure your friends are grateful you do them justice.

Cheers!

Looks like you added some blur to everything except the eyes and some of the hair on the right. This makes the result very unnatural. It seems like someone is looking through two holes in a portrait. In good photography, eyes should be sharp but that doesn't mean that the rest should be artificially blurry, except the background but you removed it.

If you're looking for something natural, I agree with others that the image is too blurred. If you're looking for something more artistic, I think it's pretty good.

For photo restoration, you must practice with the Clone tool and Healing tool. Other things can help are Smudge tool, Blur/sharpen tool and Resynthesize. The blur or smooth filters must be applied at the end, not aggressively.

To correct easily that flare light you can make a selection around it (just a little bigger) and apply Resynthesize (Enhance > Heal selection). Anyway, then you must make small corrections with the tools I mentioned.

The paintbrush/airbrush and some special brushes are useful for re paint some textures if anything to become very blurry. Even for that you can clone (clone tool) from similar textures.

You google "skin brushes" and "hair brushes". Use them pricking a color close to the areas you want to paint.

Try the g'mic/enhancement/smooth[anisotropic] for a smooth blur

thanks for all the advice, this is great

my main aim for this image was to achieve a soft focus kind of studio effect, where the main features of the face are in sharp focus and the rest just slightly blurred. though i agree it is a bit over done on the blur and not enough on the focus! i actually did use the clone tool for the hair but had to use it sparingly as the only decent clone reference points go in a different direction.

now, what is this "resynthasise" and "GMIC" that folk are talking about? they sound interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hyO4rIu-fo
You need to have installed the Resynthesizer plugin.

G'MIC is a plugin with lot of filters:
http://gmic.sourceforge.net

wow thats a nice set of filters thanks

alc59, very good!

Ok, I had to see what would get to that image.

Without major changes, seeking to preserve the original, I got this result.
Then I noticed some areas that were not good, there were white spots. But I was too lazy to redo.
I prefer sharper images with more detail. But I notice that many prefer more blurry images.
So I did two versions, differing in the amount of gloss given image.

Less Gloss Vs More Gloss (* On the right side the originals.)