Nice Portrait, A little help?

[scottws]

Took this shot in the subject's living room as sunlight was streaming in through a lace curtain. I think it captures her very well.
Shot in raw, I played a little with temperature and color in UFRaw, then sent it to gimp for a little skin touch-up and cropping.

Not sure about the table and candle in the background. Is it distracting, or does it lend context? If I should remove it, I'm at a loss for how to do that with just GIMP...

Any other comments or suggestions?
Before:


After:

[ocnsprt]

I agree with you that the table and candle are distracting. The pose is very casual and comforting, as though shes daydreaming. Good job on that capture, very well done. I personally would take out the background and put in something more appropriate to the pose. Also the natural light coming through the window is harsh in spots, I would try to diffuse just a little. I didnt see much difference in the before and after shots, maybe its just my screen. It is a pretty picture you can do alot with. Hope you dont mind if i repost a way you could edit, and if youwant to know what i did, i can send u an im or repost. let me know what you think

[tingeliM]

I love the lighting. It's a beautiful photo.

This is what I would've done:
I tweeked the curves a bit and added a smooth texture to wash out the colors just a tad.
Then I tried to clone the candle out, but I did quite a poor job at it
Maybe you can do better if you like. I used the cloning tool (the stamp) and blurring tool (water drop).

[tjlmpc]

I love to play with shots like this...had to have my go at it!



I duplicated the layer
Removed color from background layer
Gaussian Blur to top layer
Set blend mode to overlay
Adjusted saturation to blend colors
flattened the layers
duplicated the layer
Used a Diffuse Glow filter on top layer
Used an eraser at about 40% opacity to erase her face and shirt
flattened again

Thanks for letting me play!

[belladoja]

You are all brilliant in what you have done with this portrait--the capture is good to begin with and all the post processing ideas are so wonderful and creative--I do like the windowed background and then again the black and white blur is good too--gives it a dreamy effect--definitely no candle in the background--nice job all of you!!

[BabetteKD]

I desaturated it a little bit because I felt it was too bright for such a calming shot. Added some lens blur and I think that's it? I'm working on several things at once so I forgot my process.

[Usuqa]

Doubled the width of the img
moved the photo to the right and stretched the left side to fill the blank space and cloned out some things behind her.
duplicated the photo 2x both with a little motion blur and very low fill % (just to blur it a little)
duplicated one of the blur layers and applied the wallpaper filter made it b/w.

Took one of my own photos, tweaked it to fit how i liked, used hardmix and a gradient the mask layer to fade my photo into the origonal.


Thats a roughly what i done

[ocnsprt]

Usuqa thats really neat.... I like your version alot

[Usuqa]

thanks , didn't really take that long.. could probably make it look better with more time spent on it

[ocnsprt]

Well its cool as is, reminds me of a dvd cover or a vacation add, very cool