Anthony,
and I can't say I'm impressed with your work. It's amateur level at best too. Why are you giving the girl such a hard time?
Let's check out some of your work:
Firstly your webpage doesn't fit onto a standard XGA (1024x768 pixels) resolution display. The title reads UNTITLED DOCUMENT. Maybe that's part of the reason why your webpage is not even showing up in the first 100 matches when specifically searching for "anthony rhoades photographer". Maybe having meta-tags would help as well. Then frames suck and scrolling on a XGA notebook to see the entire pics just because you wasted too much space for your header is not optimal as well. Anyway, the webpage is not winning any prices... so let's check out your pics and retouching.
Your eye retouching is really terrible here. The eyes look completely unnatural, overwhite and the contour of the iris is blurred because you're obviously "amateur level at best" with the clone stamp tool.
Then the caruncula lacrimalis (pink body seen in the corner of the human eye) looks really strange too. The single spot on her cheek looks out of place as well on such a smooth picture. And look at the contour of the lip. Specially under the lower lip... awful. And btw the shooting perspective highlights particularly well that her teeth are not perfect. A shot from the other side seems to have worked much better on her teeth.
I guess I have a hard time to understand pics like these as well:
I thought photographers should take pictures of people to make them look better. Not scared and weird. Kudos for the hairstyling but I guess you didn't do that yourself.
WHAT IS THIS??? Maybe you should play again with blending effects and try to get a more uniform coverage of noise. The noise is about 5 times as bad on the subject than on the background. And very unattractive noise too. It looks like you're trying to show how bad your camera is :-)
I have no idea what that is supposed to be. Blotchy and posterization in shadow tones together with NO subject, bad cropping, no message/story, burned highlights and deepdiving blacks.
And that is NOT EVEN amateur level:
These have been all from your Portfolio 1 section. I won't comment the other portfolios as I'm not seing one professional and good picture there.
I really wonder how you got on that high horse.
Let's be friendly and let's be respectful for our fellow colleagues regardless at what level they currently shoot or retouch.
Just for the record: I don't even know the retoucher you called amateur level and I have a couple 30 inch screens (where your webpage works even less well). But some of the work she does shows her dedication and she's going to develop her skills over time. If she's earning 30 $ per image then that is maybe a lot for certain customers and at the same time VERY little to others. She will sure also raise her rate when she gets better clients (photogs) with better customers.
For you to make jokes about her rate is a bit childish... specially if your own rate is a low 60$ per hour. I earned more than double your rate over 10 years ago already.
Live and let live
Cheers
Boris
ok, when I get back to my office. You could check my website, Portfolio I, if you were so inclined. No befores however. I've taken my retouching site down as I couldn't handle another client and do more shooting than touching anymore.
The person involved with the website posted is what we call 'mid level'. Most photographers with a decent understanding of PS and a good eye can get where he/she is going. Here is a post from another forum by the owner of the website, note the date and rate (I make double that an hour retouching, not per image)
<SNIP>
Here's a real retoucher: http://christarantino.com/
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