Could you comment on my progress so far?

[keepemcomin]

This is a picture of my son that we took with a digital video camera. The camera quality isn't great, and the lighting in our old apartment was always a little yellow-ish. I am still fairly new at retouching so I'm a little lost right now, and I'm not completely happy with what I have so far. I've only done his face. If you have any suggestions for the background, too, please share them. I usually just cut the whole thing out and make it black, but I'm willing to expand a little. Thanks!

ETA:
Here's the link to the two pictures.
Original Work In Progess

[byRo]

Hi there,
You made a good start in the right direction, but there is a lot more you can do here.

If you stay around these threads you'll soon pick up a whole lot of techniques that will get the results you are looking for.... and with much less work than you'd ever have thought.

To me, this photo falls into the "enhancement" category. In other words, not retouching and not photo-art... just a good photo that could look better.
One of the basic techniques that will give good, and quick, results is to separate the grayscale (Black / White, if you wish) image from the colored stuff. Then you can make a well-defined grayscale image and combine this (blending mode "Luminosity") with a cleaned-up color image.

As to the background, a bit of blurring is enough to solve this without running the risk of looking too un-natural.

(tip: If you are new to Photoshop, learn about layers and masks - these are the tools that make all the difference)

Most important of all - Have fun!

Rô
(PS.He's cute)

[Gary Richardson]

Had a quick playaround with your image as follows. Ran noise filter, blurred background with graduated mask. sharpened around eyes, adjusted levels slightly.

[keepemcomin]

The blurred background is great, thanks. That's a much better alternative to blacking it all out like I usually do. I have never used Luminosity at all. I'll give that a try as well. Thank you both for your pointers!