This picture is from my friend's wedding. It doesn't need to be perfect, but I'm trying to make it look a little better so I can post it on her wedding website along with some others. I'm a self-taught Photoshop novice.

I thought the bagpiper looked blurry and didn't stand out. I sharpened him and put a slight blur on the background, then added some more color to his skin, bagpipe, kilt and the tag on his socks. In the actual photograph, the person doesn't take up very much of the frame and it's difficult to see the changes I made, so I cropped it. Hopefully you will be able to see what I did, it's pretty subtle. What do you think, am I on the right track?

ETA, The original photo is second, fixed is first.

What do you think, am I on the right track?
You sure are!
One of the hardest parts is identifying the problems - seems that you OK on that one. As to getting round them, that's what this place is all about.

Like you said, our kilted friend doesn't stand out too well. To separate the main subject from the background there is a whole list of variations that can be used: light / dark, saturated / unsaturated, color A / color B, sharpened / blurred.......
Our bagpiper is just too similar to the tree on the left: same lightness, same fully saturated colors, same range of colors - just the blurring alone won't be enough.
I had a go at getting two more of the differences to help out: light / dark and saturated / unsaturated.

Hope the palette shot gves the idea. The levels on the left tree increased more red and blue than green - the idea was just to lower the saturation but ended up revealing some nice colors.
The USM with 50 radius is not for sharpening, but is to increase general contrast (this helps out now that the man is dark and the rest light)

keep 'em comin', keepemcomin,

Rô

You're completely right about the tree, thank you. He blends in with it very well. I'll try your suggestions and post the result when I'm finished, thank you!

keepemcomin

Here is my take on this.
-I found the photo real blue, I adjusted with curves but you could easily use levels also.
-Skin tone was still off so I used hue/sat adjustment layer, selected the skin and moved Hue to the right.
-Still not enough pop so I merged visible into new layer and changed to softlight blend mode - masked so just the face and alittle of the body was affected.
-Then a little more pop with a curves adjsutemnt layer and masked to just the face

Hope you like it and I hope this helps,
Roger

This should be a relatively easy pic to fix. We've got nice white socks and black shoes to fix our highlights and shadows. I agree with Roger about the blues but I didn't want to reduce them quite as much. I'm beginning to find that before I do any color correction, I do my sharpening first. In this case I used High Pass at level 11 then faded back to 75% in Overlay mode. I color corrected the socks to 228 for RG & B and the shoes to 14.
Using Color Range I selected the deep tree shadows then with Magic Wand, eliminated the selections on the bagpiper. I then used a very small amount of levels to lighten the shadows.

Hope this helps.
Dave

I used the Edger from here.
http://www.bmath.net/new/prvw.htm
Did a color correction
Used color dodge and burn mode layers. (make a white layer colorburn mode and paint with black brush at about 10% opacity...black layer colordodge mode and paint with white brush at about 10%).

Tastes differ...also interpretations of an image differ.~ :rambo: