Monica Bellucci by Albert Watson

Very tedious edit or perhaps I wanted more than it was possible, especially considering it's a scan, thus very good it's never editable like if it was plain JPEG. In the end I spend much time deciding which of versions (had them few) to pick for posting, finesses are worst :)

my edit

my edit darker version

B&W version

base image

I hated how this image was flat, simply had to do something about it and it took me about 5 minutes. I love to use gradient map <> photographic toning to desaturate  the image and then I used bleach bypass with advanced blending for highlights, you gotta keep in mind all that takes turning down the opacity

my edit

base image

One of hardest edits I've ever done, I can't lead you through cuz I myself don;t know all the things I've done. Original shot was very natural and I tried to keep it that way while fixing problems like harsh shadows and so on. Most trouble I had is that I was able to make it look good up close, but when you zoom out it's totally different and that's my bigest advice to you, always zoom in and out. I must say the patch tool did a great job resolving shadow issues only trick is that you use shortcut options-control-f which enables you to change the opacity on a stroke. All in all took me two hours, lot of time went to just figure what I should do plus, I once  had to start it all  over again.

my edit

original

Isis Madonna Ferreira Basile

This image was perfect so I thought it would make A great monochrome and I had great time converting it to, it was fun, I didn't use the brush (I hate when i have to use a brush, especially cuz I don't have an tablet) so I played with gradient map, color lookup etc.

my edit

original

Cameron Diaz

Just had to reduce those shadows on her face, it was terrible plus some other things to... I think she look drunk in base image, I'm suspicious if that's even the original... Btw I've done sharpening with "noise ~ reduce noise" filter, works quite well, like everything in photoshop cc, lol btw I'm on trial but I have som 20 day left after witch I might downgrade to torrented as I have no possibilities of purchasing it.

One from drafts

Miranda Kerr at Louis Vuitton, Spring/Summer 2015 Show, Paris (01/10/2014)

Oh I stupidly lost my base image, but change isn't big, I used "adaptive wide angle" filter to basically crop the image and "bleach bypass" for highlights on her face (those are main things)

... what I missed to do is to kill hot pixels for which I'm definitely installing gimp again, GMI'C plugin should do that trick