Suggestions?

[kathiep]

Hi. I'm new to this. Two weeks new to be exact. I started with this photo, my daughters baby picture. She made it smell good by spraying it with perfume! I'd love to have any suggestions or idea's. Is there anything I could have done differently? I only have an old photo impact program to work with so I think I may be limited there. Thanks. Kathiep

[KenB]

Looks to me like you did a wonderful job, again though, it's kind of small to tell. OR, maybe my eyesights going

Ken

[kathiep]

I couldn't, for some reason edit the last photos so here are the new ones. kathiep

[KenB]

I think one thing I would have done differently than you is to add a layer mask when you softened the image by blurring slightly. This way you can go back and remove the blur from the eyes and the lips. It makes a lot of difference in the final output.

Ken

[jeaniesa]

I think you did a great job with this one - especially the bangs!!

I do notice the same thing that Ken did - the final version looks a little blurry. It also looks a little flat in the overall color tones to me. I'm not sure what tools you have in PhotoImpact, you should have the ability to increase contrast as well as sharpen a photo. That's the only thing that I did with the version I'm posting. The sharpening I did picked up a bit of the JPEG artifacts that are a result of the compression you had to do to get your file size below 100KB for uploading here. So, that shouldn't be an issue on the "real" version that you have. Ken's suggestion for using a layer mask to remove the softness you added from the eyes, nose & mouth is a good one - but you have to have kept the layers you worked on for that to work. (BTW, if you're not familiar with layers, you will be soon if you follow the info you find on this site.)

Contrast and sharpening are fairly easy fixes. You did a great job cleaning up the stain - that was the hard part!!

Jeanie

[kathiep]

Thanks Jeaniesa and KenB. Here's my new work thanks to your suggestions. Any other suggestions? kathiep

[kathiep]

Thanks Jeaniesa and KenB. I accidently sent the wrong photo last night. Thia is the completed one. Does anyone have any other suggestions for these? Thanks a million. kathiep

[KenB]

Very nice job.

Ken

[jeaniesa]

Kathie, You did a great job of increasing the contrast!

What you've posted still looks a little soft to me, but that could easily be the JPEG compression. (Happens all the time.) This may be the effect you wanted anyway. It's just that when I compare the details in the original (eyes, nose, creases in cheeks) to the final, it seems that some of the detail was lost. Perhaps if you share the steps you used to fix the photo, we could give you an idea of where the softening occured. (Or, perhaps you already know!) Or perhaps it couldn't be helped with the damage that you had to fix!

Jeanie