While waiting for your photo submissions, I enhanced a picture Cammy2005 posted of her niece Ella on the FIX MY PIC Flickr pool.

Here’s what the original looks like. Please click, don’t squint:

As you can see, it’s not that bad. It’s kind of nice actually. Yet there is something snapshottish about it.

I started by adjusting the colors. The bench is way too bright compared to her skin, which makes the whole picture a bit smudged. Bench saturation down, skin saturation up. It’s that easy.

Her skin is perfect already but it doesn’t glow. Whoever invented glowing skin should be crucified because skin doesn’t glow naturally. Ok, it does if you use special lighting but again, is that natural? Anyway, I gave in and made it glow.

Ella’s eyes are beautiful and big but they need something. Photoshop, please, make her eyes have that something! (Psst! It’s contrast.)

One of the things that separate snapshots from quality photography is distracting backgrounds. Thank Adobe we have the crop tool. Wow, much better already.

We’re almost there, just one more thing: focus. Some parts of the picture need to look extra crisp whereas other parts don’t need that much attention. Let’s sharpen here and blur there. Nice.

Here’s the final version, what do you think? Please click, don’t squint: