Beautiful Little Girl but OMG horrible background!

[cfingram]

This little girl's smile is goergous and the aunt absolutely without a doubt wanted this photo no matter what. I'm fairly new to photography, I have a lot to learn. I couldn't bring myself to just give it as-is and I gave it my best shot to edit it and turned it to BW so that it wouldn't look so bad...she LOVED it and was thrilled to death about the edit.

How's the edited photo? This is my first time editing to this extend with PSE6.


Thank you in advance for your CCs!!! Carole

p.s. I'm NEW here and look forward to making friends!

BEFORE - SOOC - sharpened for web

AFTER

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3063/2763348441_fce166234d_o.jpg

 

[AussieDee]

Beautiful smile indeed!

I agree about the color background... the B/W however is a big improvement but I'm not sure I"m liking the patterned cloning tool if that's what you used? I think I would've just blurred the background a lot more than the original is.

 

[elemental]

I do like the cloned-out background, and the little girl's smile is excellent. Would it work in color?

 

[manaheim]

BTW, you may have gone a bit overboard on the sharpening.

I think I might have gone more for a blur and less for the funky cloning thing.

God... trash can and all, eh? That has to be frustrating.

 

[usayit]

A little more care with the brush too....

Missed a little under the pony tail.

 

[tirediron]

Agree with above comments.

 

[cfingram]

Thanks guys for all your help and comments. The little girl just quickly passed me and I asked "Can I take a picture" and she said YES and she posed immediately, I didn't have time to look at the background and when I loaded up the pictures on my pc, I was SOOOOOO dissapointed about the background but wow, what a cute smile! It's my first "heavy" edit, I've never had to fix a background to that extent. I did "over" do the sharpening but only for web purposes, I didn't sharp the original quite as much, it's half that .

I had a lot of trouble to clone out the background, it was very hard to do and the pony tail was the hardest. I converted to black and white in order to "help" the picture out a little bit more, the color is not as pretty, it's a shame! I wish I was better at editing but I don't have enough experience with PSE6 yet, I'm still all confused about all the options, I don't even know how to blur a background yet! I'm hoping to take a class in PSE6 soon (they offer one at our local YMCA).

Thanks again for all your comments.

 

[maulrat]

Personally, I would fake (bokeh) the background then layer mask it into the original photo. I hated Photoshop Elements because I couldn't layer mask but now I just found out that it can be done. Below is a link to download a free layer mask tool for PSElements 6.

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pselements/qt/layermasktool.htm

As I was talking about above, make a copy of the original. Blur the copy using Gaussian Blur to your liking then mask the blurred background onto your original layer using the layer mask tool. If you need further tutorials on layer masking, just google "+photoshop+tutorial+layer+mask". There are tons out there. Hope this works out for ya and good luck =)

 

[srt86hil]

I'm afraid I prefer the original, simply because it's so obvious that you've been using a brush tool in the edit. I would try selecting the bg (with a feather), apply a bit of a gaussian blur, and then maybe consider the b+w conversion. Alternatively, you could only desaturate the bg, but some people don't like this look.

 

[SBlanca]

i think in the second she looks like she's falling backwards..

 

[Raze]

What a cutie!
I like the idea of the b&w, but I hate HATE hate cloning marks! (probably because I see it so much on photos we get supplied for printing), I think I'd prefer her on a totally different background.

 

[photographyaddict]

It is a great smile, of course. And I think you could've cropped it so her face really is the center of the image. The black and white is great. Her eyes just twinkle!