I would like some help on techniques that can be used to make this webcam picture of my daughter look better.

I am a NOVICE so detailed instructions would be appreciated. Up until this point I mainly use Fireworks MX 2004 but eventually plan on learning Photoshop.

Thanks in advance and attached is the picture.

Hi,

Welcome to RP.

There's not really too much you can do with a heavily pixellated picture like this. The only way to "lose" the pixellation is to blur it slightly, but that will lead to a loss of detail.

You can only manipulate data thats there,using a picture editor, if the data isn't there to begin with, there's not much you can do.

Have had a go with your image, but any "improvement" is marginal.

Well I worked with it some also. I adjusted the color and had fairly good success using the reduce noise filter in Photoshop CS2

maybe a little too interpretive for most tastes...
just wanted to see how far I could go.

- Smudge, blending Color: on "average" the colors are OK, just all blotched up;
- Doubled size: to have more pixels to play with;
- on Luminosity, duplicate, median radius 5, hide-all mask;
- Painted mask, white for background, 50% for skin;
- Smudged hair using a "hair" brush from David Nagel;
- Masked in a GBlurred layer on some of the skin;
- General smudging and touching-up

Rô

THis was about 15 to 20 minues of work. Ran Neat Image first then a few other steps, some smoothing, some painting, and color adjustment. Alot softer than a photo, but not pixelated anymore. :D

Dawn

Grain Surgery to denoise and sharpen. Levels to fix color (touch middle eyedropper on eye). Color Replacement tool on a few areas.

Thanks for all the suggestions and help thus far.