Are you smiling yet?
She has the sweetest face!
This is Bree's little girl from ...
Learning is fun!
The original is a beautiful photograph. The little girl had such a cute expression on her face that I cropped in tight to see it. The close crop had missing details, and I should have panned back out to finish editing... but, hey, what if a client begged for such a close up? (I know. Really? ...Just go with it for discussion sake.) So my self-challenge was on to see if I could restore - make that, reasonably restore - the close up. I consider that "tenacity" on my part. My husband would say "stubbornness". Whichever. Can I say in my defense that because I live in a small, rural town, and my kids attend small schools that I pitch in and do promotional materials and yearbook editing? I "make do" with scraps of photos and try to edit them to be presentable. So, the above scenario isn't really far-fetched and that I have actually attempted such things!
As far as the process goes, it's a bit confusing because I kept re-doing and fussing. Adjustments: curves, levels, contrast, brightness, vibrance, saturation. To smooth skin: several high pass filters. For missing details: smudged, blurred, sharpened, duplicated, cloned, saturated. Then I zoomed in extra close so at some points I could actually paint pixel by pixel to fix areas. At the end, I blended the original crop with the edited crop to bring out some of the original shading and details that may have faded out during processing.
If there weren't housework, meals, and shopping to get done (and I'm sneaking in lunch with my mom), I would work on blending together all the parts of the photo. Let me know how you would finish adjusting it. Thanks!
Did I mention that my iris plants have poked up their little heads
through the soil? Go Spring!
On the other hand, six inches of snow is predicted for tonight.
