washed out faces

[lorelei9]

Hi all,

There is a lot of things that need improving and I have pretty much figured out how to do those things. However, I'm stuck on how to bring out the details on the faces of the individuals on the back row (third and fourth from the left). I've tried doing some dodging but it gives a "ghostly" appearance.

If anyone wants to take a stab at improving the whole picture, you are welcome to.

Any suggestions is appreciated.

Tim

[mistermonday]

Tim, add a new layer on top of the background and fill it with 50% gray and change the Blend Mode to Overlay. Then with a soft black brush at about 10 or 15 % opacity, paint over the areas you want to darken. If they get to dark, switch the brush to white at approx 5% opacity and paint over the same areas to lighten them. I attached an 30 sec example but did not spend more than a minute on you image because it is severely overcompressed and a lot of data is gone. FYI, in future instead of leaving your image at 200 ppi and compressing it at jpg setting 1 (the absolute poorest quality) you would be better resizing the image to 72 ppi and saving on jpg setting 7 or 8. If you have a decent quality original, you should be able to get some pretty good results.
Regards, Murray