trying to make this into a better photograph

[Dak Paule]

This is a picture of my aunt holding her great grandbaby. They both fell asleep and my neice took the picture with her cell phone so the quality is pretty bad. I wanted to try to make it into a better photo to give to her grandaughter. It has a lot of noise in it so I used Topaz denoise and did some d&b and cropped. Any suggestions on improving the image would be appreciated or have fun with a artsy play with it if you want.

Dak

[0lBaldy]

Dak, I would crop in portrait rather than landscape or square

[Nasturtium]

cropped to straighten back of chair & to get rid of game controller

cloned out the bright window and lines behind the lady's head
cloned out the light switch plate

selective detail enhancement (baby's face and the lady's beautiful and graceful hands) and blurring/noise reduction in the rest of the image

square crop to emphasize the peacefulness of their sleeping but with the baby diagonal to give it some dynamism

warmed up the skin

you might consider changing the bright color of the socks, they're a bit distracting

Most definitely an image worth taking some time with.

- Nancy

[Dak Paule]

Thanks for the suggestions OlBaldy and Nancy. This time I desaturated the blue socks and cropped in portrait instead of landscape. I do like that better. I will try the square crop also.

Dak

[Joeven]

I roughed it up a bit and flipped it.

Joe

[gholmes1936]

I went for a different effect, more open, airy, muted colors. Photoshop plus some Topaz work in it also.

[lkroll]

Not a photographic save; many may not think it an artistic interpretation save either. lol

Click here for the complete rendition; attached is a lower quality crop.

[LQQKER]

Nice entries by all. A shame about the loss of detail due to noise, but regardless, it's all about capturing the moment.

[wayman]

Thought I would change it a little bit since she looks so tired.

[Kraellin]

hi dak,

you can always put a photo like this in the retouch forum or the restoration forum or the image help forum and then bring the revised rendition here for play.

what i did was all in paint shop pro. i just did a photo correction. feel free to use this for the art part. i applied 'fade correction', 'tone mapping', 'digital camera noise removal' and 'unsharp mask'. i think it came out rather well

[chillin]

2 diff options

[ghealy]

That is a real sweet scene, Dak. Thought a B&W with a soft focus and a vignette might be a decent treatment.
Thanks for the opportunity to play.