Shot of my wife goofing around as we were taking a walk. When I got home, I realized it would work for the challenge. I doubt it will do real well, since it wasn't a setup and perfectly lit shot. I'm also not sure how the soft-focus effect or editing eyes will go over.
Cropped, levels, curves, desaturated all but yellow, did some cloning and healing, color replace on the eyes, USM, applied soft-focus filter, resized, added border.
Hopefully I get over a 5.0.
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Oops, you aren't supposed to have a portrait picture with the subject looking "out" of the frame. Should have cropped so she is looking INTO the frame.
This is a really nice, simple, well composed shot. Great dof and a very pleasant soft focus to it. The way the flower stands out is perfect. The yellow eys - they look un natural, alien, and totally out of place. Even if they are that color in real life, I woud have greyscaled them with the rest of the face. This picture would have earned a 9 or 10 from everyone easy.
I can only hope the intention was not to make the eyes look yellow also. Unfortunately, that is what I'm seeing and it looks very creepy. The thin yellow border only emphasizes it. The tones in the b&w portion of her skin could be better. There is a very shiny pale area running from her forehead over her left eye and along her nose and down her mouth. It is very distracting. When you convert color to black and white you aren't done. You still need to tone the greys so they aren't so dull looking. An easy way of doing this in PS is to adjust hue/saturation, clicking on the colorize box and then moving the saturation level to very low. You can also adjust the hue level to get the tone you like. I prefer to pretty much leave it in the middle where it is.
For me, your yellow key line in the frame here is a mistake - it amkes the frame part of the picture, rather than something to isolate the picture from its surroundings, precisely because you've used that colour as your choice in the image. The remaining colour in the eyes looks so unreal too - I really do think you should have desaturated those areas also. There's also a pull introduced by your cropping between the face and the flower and the negative space image right - but I don't see a purpose of that negative space here, other than to place the flower on the cntre of image, which I think is weak, compositionally. I like the softness of the image, has a suitability for what feels quite old-time, but I also think you could have found some more definition with your lighting - more depth. All of which sounds hyper-critical, but actually to my eye you're not far off something rather nice here. 6
This is nice. I like the soft focus and the desaturation works well. The only suggestion is to maybe play with the lighting a little bit since it seems to be a little bit off.
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