Portrait practice

Really like it, but it's one of those that really depends on the subject. For the right personality this is a really good pose. Of course you're the only one here that knows the subject as more than just an image so it's hard to know. Guess I'll just assume it really fits her personality

A couple nitpicks...

The bright yellow just above eye level is distracting. It almost looks like car headlights coming at you, but I'm guessing it's probably a sunset. Moving down a bit might have helped, or it might have made her pose not work.

And something that I always struggle with too is hair. Having her brush the hair on the right side of her head back behind where the camera couldn't see it would hide it so it wasn't as distracting. Same with the few strands on her shoulder, although I probably wouldn't have noticed those if the ones next to her chin were there. Either would be fairly easy to take out in Gimp though.

Looking at the EXIF you had a flash fire. Is that the on-camera flash or do you have an external? I'm thinking this shot might have been better sans-flash with a reflector to bounce light back in to her face. Her face looks a little too white for the background. Or maybe drop the flash compensation a bit. Shooting weddings I would leave my flash set to either -1/3 or -2/3 of a stop to keep the shot from being obviously flashed.

All around though, great shot. The blur behind looks great and draws attention where it should be - on her. It also is obvious she's looking at the camera without it looking like a posed shot.

Either way as soon as I hit post I'm going to tag this one in to the feature images gallery 

I keep coming back to the blurred sunrise and the more I look at it the more I like it. It's distracting, but I don't know that that's a bad thing.  I'd bet it would look better if the lighting on her face was closer to the color of the sun. A bit of localized color changes in Gimp might do the trick. In the future a gold reflector would help get it in camera.

Wow. Thats way better. I played with the original image but the only color control Ive really learned how to use is the color balance and i couldn't get the same effect with that. What did you use to turn up the yellow? Also I noticed the skin looks way better. Is that just a result of the re-compression or did your correct it? Ive been struggling with skin retouching. 

PS Thanks Marian. The side by side is is a huge help. I didn't really grasp the concept till I saw that.

Turbo, all I did for her skin texture was make a new layer, run the image through a noise reduction software, and then erase back the parts I didn't want smooth.

To create the yummy yellows, I simply sampled a golden color from the image, made a color overlay, toggled it around a bit, then erased with a soft opacity eraser on her skin just a bit, then a bit harder over her eye and lips. Using the overlay allowed a more even yellow to the entire image, so there wasn't that stark division in the middle.

Total time, about 3 minutes.

Glad I could help.

I like that last one the best of the 3 versions. Marian's try is a bit too orange for my taste, although I haven't calibrated in a while so that may be part of it too.

I think you nailed it on the last edit!