Help with a photo..

[Seltzer]

Looking through my photos from Christmas I found one that I rather enjoy the composition of but alas, I had forgotten to turn the flash on. While playing in the RAW data I stumbled upon the idea of making it look like an old time photo, colors a bit washed out and underexposed, as it quite was.

Here is what I have so far, any suggestions or ideas or should I just give up?
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/82945141@N00/343453694/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/132/343453694_5656ffb4d4.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="boy and cat" /></a>

I basically overexposed it somewhere a little over 2, played with the temp in the white balance, put saturation about 30 and adjusted the gamma and Linearity (what does this mean?) way down. Then after making the jpg I went in and despeckled the image
If anyone wants to play, I have the 7mb RAW file here (http://johnwright.homeip.net/dps/boyandcat.cr2).

[googlit]

hmm... not too much you can do with it due to the heavy grain. It was a good idea to try for the old-time look, though. It works fairly well. I took that idea and ran with it:

http://lh4.google.com/image/googlit/RZtHAUlPxJI/AAAAAAAAAvE/uZ3tnplrsQw/s288/boyandcat.jpg (http://picasaweb.google.com/googlit/DPSPhotoshopEdits/photo#5015680680857683090)

let me know if you'd be interested in the Photoshop file. otherwise, it's probably getting trashed.

[Seltzer]

Thanks googlit! It looks great. I still want to play with it some more, especially when I noticed today that there is now a tutorial on how to make the old time look in photos. No need to keep your ps file, thanks for the offer. Did you do anything outside of what is covered in the tutorial?

[googlit]

The one extra thing I did was to draw in some detail in the face. I created a new layer on top of everything, grabbed the darkest color in the image, and traced around the eyes, nose, and ears, then filled in the eye-whites with the lightest color in the image. I think I turned the opacity of that layer down to 60% or so. Do whatever looks good to you. :)

[Seltzer]

Thanks, will hopefully have some time to play with it before going out tonight. will post results whenever I have them.

[dkchac]

http://digital-photography-school.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=91&stc=1&d=1167975485

http://digital-photography-school.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=92&stc=1&d=1167975514

http://digital-photography-school.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=93&stc=1&d=1167975514

http://digital-photography-school.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=94&stc=1&d=1167975514

These are just some quick fixes I did in Corel Paintshop Photo Pro XI.

Debbie