Portrait practice

This is one of the shots from our lighting class tonight. Model had pretty difficult skin, shiny and bumpy...

1) As shot vs post processed

2) larger version of processed

Any suggestions for further improvement?

I think you did a great job otherwise. The large processed shot looks great. Needs just a little more skin touchup. What you have so far doesn't look too bad (slightly painted but it goes well with the overall feel of the photo)

Looks good, Jet. Her skin looks very saturated and reddish but still looks nice. You smoothed her out nice, but I also like her as she was.
Were you using strobes here?

A little orangish but still, a nice job on the PP. To alleviate the shine what about putting the main light on the short side and use a fill light one, two or three stops less than the main? Just an idea.

Theme of the class last night was broad light, so I did manage to sneak a few shot lit from the short side with a silver reflector (hand held) for fill but haven't processed those yet. This was a simple 2 light setup using white lightning 600 monolights (1 key 1 background). The color shift from original to final is the result of shooting a 5600k WB and using a digital target in PP to set the final white point/black point and color temp (wound up around 5573 so it wasn't too far off). I had tried to push the skin smoothing a little further but it was looking a bit plastic for my taste - tried to retain some skin texture.

The processed one for me. This model I can see being difficult to accurately capture, due to her shinny skin, but you seem to have done a nice job. Good separation from the background .. it looks so 3-D !! I like her outfit too -- looks Greek or Roman.