Portrait of Happy and Sad

Here is another in a series of mask portraits I had done. Candlelight lighting moved over and around subjects during long exposure. Cleaned up and enhanced a bit in psp8 and added lighting effect from top left of frame. Your thoughts . . .

Really well done. The only thing that bothers me is the dark area on the sad mask. It's too linear / covers too much of the face I think. I believe a dark area in general would suit the composition, but I'd make it smaller and see if you can make it follow an irregular path across the face....

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Originally Posted by PuckJunkey

Really well done. The only thing that bothers me is the dark area on the sad mask. It's too linear / covers too much of the face I think. I believe a dark area in general would suit the composition, but I'd make it smaller and see if you can make it follow an irregular path across the face....

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Yes , I was not sure about how abrupt and linear that shadow line was. Replaced the original with this slightly edited version with a more subtle shadow line. Thanks for your time . . .

Nice innovative image. I really like the way you are willing to take some initative and create an photo from an image in your mind.

I like the lighting on this, the technique is different from the norm and I think it works. I wonder what it looked like before the photoshop lighting technique was applied, as I think that shadow is a bit distracting. I particularly like the way the masks seem to fade into the black background.

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Originally Posted by darkrainfall

I like the lighting on this, the technique is different from the norm and I think it works. I wonder what it looked like before the photoshop lighting technique was applied, as I think that shadow is a bit distracting. I particularly like the way the masks seem to fade into the black background.

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Thanks all for commenting....as for the image without lighting effects, this is it. Not sure which I like best. . . .actually now that I compare them, I do like it best without the lighting effect. I think this one is the keeper. . . .

That one is almost perfect I think. All I would try to do (and you could do it with some selective color burning in PS) is put a bit of shadow along the bottom left corner. Literally just balance off the amount of shadow on the top right (i.e. not nearly as much as the other shot).