Tiny Dancer

[Bambi]

The legs are still a bit ragged. Anything else I can do to make this better?

[Mhayes]

Beautiful job so far Bambi!  :up:

[Lynnya]

Beautiful Bambi..I love this picture..

[Mike Morrell]

I agree, excellent job so far Bambi!

The shape of the arms/legs looks fine to me. And I think you have most of the highlights/shadows all in the right places. But the arms and legs still look a bit flat to me in places.You asked for suggestions and mine is to introduce some extra shadows (and increase/sharpen existing ones) to increase the '3-D modeling' effect on the arms and legs. The tonal contrast in her arms and legs is quite low in the restore. Increasing this would help, I think.

A few examples:
- the shadowed area on the girl's right shoulder looks excellent and could be your reference point for shadows/highlights; the same is true for the shadow under her left armpit
- the shadows above and beneath the girl's elbow in the original aren't there in the restore
- the highlighted area of the girl's left thigh is narrower in the original than in the restore; the shadowed areas (left and right) are wider and more pronounced. The same goes for the girl's upper right thigh: it's more shadowed in the original than in the restore
- the girl's right (back) leg down to her calf has deeper shadow in the original than in the restore, especially at the back of her knee.
- in the original, the shins, insteps, the backs of her calves and the area under her ankles on both legs have more shadow in the original than in the restore

In the original, the color of the shadows is a reddish brown. In the restore they look more greyish. Maybe adjusting the color of the shadows would help too.

All these points add up to just adding/increasing shadows by a small percentage to give a more 'rounded' look to arms and legs with slightly deeper shadows.

Hope this helps,

Mike

PS. All these tips apply equally well to the restore I'm working on so now I'm going to take my own advice ;)

[Mike Morrell]

Hi Bambi,

I just tried out the suggestions I gave you on the photo I'm working on (a girl's arms). For what it's worth, I think I improved the '3D-modeling' by:
- applying three different curves adjustments: dark shadows, mid-tone shadows and light shadows and really (extremely!) trying to model the muscles/tendons! B&W fotos on internet are great for showing tonal differences; the result of this step was that my subject (an 8 year old girl) looked like a hardened bodybuilder!
- applying a gaussian blur to each of the curves masks (so they blend better)
- scaling back the opacity of each curve (a whole lot!) so that the end result looks like a normal 8 year old girl

Mike

[Bambi]

You're right, Mike, I'll try that.

[Mhayes]

Nice tip Mike.

Margie