What I've done in this work:
It may look like there hasn't been done much, but that's definitely a good thing. Photo retouching is about boosting quality without letting the photo look too much edited. It's a lot of fine tuning and it took me several hours. I created a stronger focus on the face and upper body, changed her hair color, skin tone, color of her jeans and the background color manually with painting and re-adjusting. It's the same process for the lightsetting, it's all painted and not just a change in the settings and that's why it takes quite a long time and that's also why it doesn't look edited (as in you wouldn't notice, if you didn't know the original).
I finally had some more time to do personal stuff. This time, I looked for free stock images and treated them as if they were supposed to be showcased as photography. So, I was basically looking for stock images that had a certain amount of quality in them, but no editing done yet.
I haven't touched photo retouching for portraits for a long time and I definitely had fun getting back into it. It's really good practice for me, as I mainly use photo editing techniques to push the quality of my art to the next level.
I'm really happy about how it turned out, I didn't want to go for a too digital looking style. Creating flawless skin and corrected bodies is something I'm against, as it creates a false standard for your self image and perception of beauty. That's why I didn't clear up much skin, which is pretty flawless in the original already, anyways.
Wow... awesome!
Amazing. At first glance it just looked like the same picture but a bit darker/with different lighting, but when taking a closer look (and reading the description) I, you know, can see what you did there :P I'm impressed.
i love it.
Yet another wonderful natural talent you have sir. I admit I do envy the depth of your thought processes sometimes.