Portrait Editing Stages

These are some edits of a photo I took of my friend Ben. I have used a skull image I found on Google images to layer ontop of his face, and did the same with the silhouettes of some flying birds in the background to help fill out a fairly empty background. I also saturated the image and used some blue/green colour tones.

Why I wanted to change this primary edit: 
I felt that it wasn't contrast-y enough and it wasn't eye catching.
Though this was a photo of skull imposed onto the subject's face, the image of death, I felt that it wasn't strong enough on his face. In the image above I had only pasted the skull image on and cut around the edges so it fit nicely on the subject's face. To make sure you could see his facial features properly  I adjusted the layer fill before merging layers. I went on to edit this in the next picture by using the burn tool to put more of a dark tone to the shadows.
Something I felt that was an issue in the was the birds in the background. When I did this shoot I was shooting at F1.8, so the rest of the background should have been completely out of the focus. When I  edited the birds on in the background I didn't notice that they were too sharp and not blurred enough, totally juxtaposing the fast aperture I was using. When I edited the picture, I used the blur tool on Photoshop CS6 at home to make the birds less in focus. 

Why I wanted to change this secondary edit:

Though I like this edit, I felt that even though I had edited the contrast and lightness of this picture, the subject doesn't pop out at the screen enough. To do this in the photo below I used the burn tool further to add more contrast to the shadows in his coat and further more on the subject's face. Concerning the face, I also felt that his face wasn't pale enough considering it was a skull on his face, and bone is supposed to be white, which in this edit it isn't. So by using the dodge tool I went to brush around his facial features to give a nicer ivory bone tone to recreate the bone.
In the next edit I went on to further blur out the birds in the background to make them blend in more with the sky. This edit was one of the more subtle changes I made to the picture.

Final Edit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/luke_mellor/8364125443/sizes/l/in/set-72157632170006497/
High Quality 5440 x 3776
I like using Flickr because you can download the full size files of your photos, something I find very helpful.

This is my final edit of the photo.