[bubblegumsnapshots]

Originally Posted by naeno

Let me be the first to welcome you to DPS!

What a kind looking woman! I'm sure she's also very strong to have made it to 102!

The coloring is quite off, which has been stated previously, so I won't go into further detail. However, one thing that has not been touched on is that when the picture is viewed large, you can see that focus actually fell on her nose rather than her eyes. Portraiture is all about the eyes, no matter the age of the person being photographed. Might I make the following suggestion (let me know if you want me to remove it, and I gladly will). I decided to desaturate, but didn't want to go entirely b&w.


The steps I took to achieve this were:

1. Open the image in GIMP, and duplicate the layer
2. Go to Colors-Hue/Saturation and desaturated the colors a bit, then selected around the eyes using the lasso tool (and feathering the edges) and desaturated more so the skin around the eyes balanced with the rest of her skin
3. Selected around the entire eye area using the lasso tool (again, feathering the edges), and used Filters-Enhance-Unsharp Mask to sharpen up the area around the eyes. Then, I duplicated this step several times on the iris/pupil to get the eyes sharp.
4. Duplicated the top layer, and added a Filter-Blur-Gaussian Blur (set to 5.0). This was to throw the nose out of focus. Then, on this same layer I added a white layer mask. Using a black brush, I painted back in the eyes so they were sharp again. (If you are unfamiliar with what I'm talking about, please just ask). Looking at it again, I probably should have masked back in her lips too so they remained sharper.
5. Flattened the image and saved.

Please let me know if you have any questions. This all honestly took me about 5 mins to do. It took a lot longer to type. Good luck!

This is actually the portrait, the other was more of an art thing but...thank you for pointing out the focus issue, and for those with suggestions. I did try to desaturate a little and did not sharpen her as much. This is going to be send to the newspaper so I think it will be black/white but this is also going to be printed for her bday party at the care center. Let me know thoughts,suggestions...Thanks!