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Judson: Two things I need to say first . . . First, I agree with Michael, and, second, I have the very same problems Michael mentions. I paint free for families portraits of their children killed in the wars, so obviously I must paint from photos. The things he outlines in your case apply to me also. Like Michael, I mention my own problems as a way to say I'm not picking on you. I have often thought that if I had a third arm, I'd hold a gun to my head as I paint in an effort to make myself not follow the photograph so much.
One thing I have learned (and still struggle with) is the "value clumping" that occurs in photographs. I have tried many things to get around this. One thing that helps is to fiddle with the photo in a photo editing program such as Photoshop. I'm not good at Photoshop, either, but I try to lighten the shadow areas. I'll attempt to do that with the sliders in "LEVELS," or I will often fiddle with the light/dark/contrast after I have changed from color to b&w. Sometimes, I paint most of the flesh from the b&w version, checking color now and again with a quick glance at the color version of my photo reference.
I'm getting better at doing this, but it is still a struggle. It is very difficult not to paint what you see. One thing I do as surreptitiously as possible is study people in real life situations. Some of them probably think me weird when they catch me staring at them. But it seems to help a little. I think our brains will do a better job of remembering a thing in which we are mightily interested.
You might try doing some quick studies from photos and force yourself to paint the shadows lighter in value.
My comment about a background is that if it calls attention to itself, it is probably over painted, and it points out one more problem of painting from photos: Our tendency is to say, "Well, if it's there, I should probably paint it," and often in photo work, the background is close enough to the subject-plane to be seen as sharp, and so we tend to include too much detail from photo reference backgrounds.
Having bashed you about, let me say along with Michael, you've done well. Keep working.
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