Peekaboo! Edit Challenge

Now, this was a surprise!  I found the EditMe Challenge is up and running again.  I appreciated their challenge when I was first practicing my editing.  I learned so much from the participants, and I connected with new bloggie friends.  Glad they are back :o)

It is a busy week... but in honor of reconnecting with EditMe, I set aside a little editing time to submit an edit.
This photo was taken by Stephanie from Gray Mornings Photography.

Here is my edit:

As far as what I did to edit it... yikes!  I kept trying so many ideas:
I first changed out the colors of the quilt background to bring more attention to her face, but I wasn't satisfied with the results. After other attempts, the main changes that you see are from: some smoothing on the skin using a reversed highpass filter; adding a heavy gaussian blur and some painting over the quilt to draw all our attention to that cute little smile, some cropping, a photo filter to tone the color, and a copied layer set to overlay to pop some color.  Then added some canvas for the framing, and a bit of text. That's the main idea... I had so many layers from experimenting :o)

Here is the original:

Let me know what you think!

Glad you're back, EditMe!