A little cow girl

[kliph]

My niece took this picture of her daughter. They are avid cowboys and are raising their daughter to be a cowgirl. Her favorite song right now is "Cowgirls don't cry" by Brooks and Dunn.
Unfortunately, this picture suffers from blur that I cannot fix. Does anyone have some ideas for this picture? I think that it has a lot of potential. Just not sure what to do with it.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Aleksman71]

Make it look old.

[igot2pman]

I use my most advanced shapener to do this, then i color corrected some of the harsh redness on her face.

USM can help here, just work slow and do it in doses.

hope it helps,
-Keven

[crazyfly1]

I think this is mostly out of focus blur (witness the in focus blanket and shoe).
I started with a contrast adjustment with curves. Used a highpass filter layer with 12 for the setting and soft light for the blend mode. I threw a pretty high smart sharpen at it (165,1) and set the blend mode on that layer to luminocity.

[unimatrix001]

I sharpened using smart sharpen 100 percent with a radius of 1.6 and in the remove box i chose lens blur. then ran high pass filter set at 1.0 set to linear light ran noiseware on high pass layer to reduce grain. then ran smart sharpen on the original layer same settings and chose motion blur from the remove menu with an angle of 25degrees.

[kliph]

thanks for all of the help! I appreciate the "how I did it" that really helps!

[0lBaldy]

into Image Analyzer (Operations>filters>Restoration by Deconvolution) using corrections for motion blur and gauss blur to sharpen
into Photoshop
copied background
Straightened
Ran Palms min sketch action till the first stop To get a light outline
copied the copy and moved to top of stack ..changed blend mode to multiply
Curves adjustment layer

[Southbay]

Gave it a go.

USM x 3.
Hi pass soft light.
Kill highlights 25/35.
Correct color (too warm, IMO).
Curves.
Select bgnd & more curves.
Dust & scratches 1/10 painted w/history brush to reduce sharpening halos/artifacts.
Done in a blur of activity...so that's all I remember. It's a tough one. Don't think it could ever be tweaked to my liking. At least not by me.

If the young lady really does pursue her Cowgirl dream, I'm sure there'll be plenty more great shots ahead.

SB

[learninlady]

I did a run of neat image and ran it through fade correction.
Of course the best sharp you are going to have is to get the focus on the camera correct before hand and that is going to be the only natural photo otherwise in one way or another its going to look retouched.

[Peter S]

Originally Posted by kliph

Just not sure what to do with it.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Well you could make the blur work for you.
My go, not a retouch, but you did ask for ideas as to what could be done!
(and it is a nice pic)

Peter

[Southbay]

Originally Posted by Peter S

Well you could make the blur work for you.

Nice one! A better over all solution, I think.

[kliph]

Originally Posted by Southbay

Nice one! A better over all solution, I think.

I agree! They all look great, and I appreciate the work. This one seems to use the blur. Ok, how did you do it