Here's my take on the photo. I'm personally always fighting clutter in my photos and trying to simplify them. In the photo having the focus sharp on the photographer and not the boy is a big issue to me. I decided to remove the Mom photographer as she didn't add to the story IMHO. I find the boy playing with the birds far more interesting.
Steps I did:
1. Adjusted the levels as per
this tutorial.
2. Removed photographer's arm and replaced it with birds from far left bottom of the original photo. Corrected with rubber stamp tool.
3. Cropped to recompose.
4. Used "smart sharpen" to get the blurry boy as sharp as possible. (amount=80%, Radius 2.5 pixels)
5. Changed your lens aperture.
Entered quick mask mode and did my best to paint the boy and the birds; still not happy with the selection I did around the lower bird on the boy's arm. Once the boy and birds were painted in red, I applied a gradient fill on the lower half of the photo to paint the bottom portion in red and fading (transparent) once it reached the stroller. Exit quick mask mode. I then used the Blur -> lens blur filter to make the background blur, yet keep the boy and the birds on the ground unchanged. (shape=6, radius=38, else=defaults) Mask looked like:
6. Wanted to get the bird closest to the boy's mouth more prominent, but it's mostly in the shadows. Adjusted the gamma via levels adjustment layer and unmasked only around the highlights on boy's face and on the bird. (midtone input level = 1.16)
7. Bumped up the saturation a small amount. (+10)
voilą
