New in photography.. What to do to improve this shot?

[jade_gymnast]

Hey, im relatively new in the world of photography, and i would like to share with you one of my favorite portraits. It isnt modeled, just taken of a friend of mine. All of my friends have gotton used to me having my camera in my hand, so they normally act natural =)
before:

after:

as im not lucky enough to have photoshop, i use picnik and gimp. I used the holga affect in picnik and messed with the contrast in gimp
How can i improve this shot?

Oh, and heres my flickr =) : Flickr: ♥jade♥'s Photostream

[castman]

I would like to see her hole ear it this photo And I think I would try to blur the stuff in the back more. I think you have a nice photo to work with.


~Rob

[sandraodarp]

I think you have done a great job with levels and contrast. I would have blured the background more and tried to erase that blur right on top of her nose. Just a minor detail though....

[flavio]

I agree with Peano, yet again, his treatment for this shot is quite apropriate.

[FoG]

Learn to use L:ayers and you will be doing pics like Peano's edit of yours in minutes... they are really easy to use once you get the hang of it and also big tip first make a copy of the original to work on NEVER work on the original

[daddyoproductions]

I like the treatment a lot; those two larger water drops on her jawline are distracting to me though, don't know why.

[jbm1991]

Nice photo and edit
I tried an edit myself, hope you dont mind
i used layers to perform various different filters and level adjustments.
Came out a bit contrasty for my liking but i did rush it as its 5 past 5 in the morning (why the hell am i still on here )

Hope you like it

[Brett Valentine]

I love that picture! I think you took a great shot.

Editing ideas? Okay, here's a possibility. Don't know if picnik or gimp has this capability, but here's one possibile option. I'll give you all the steps I took.

Well, first I ran a B&W filter on the color shot. The most important thing was a red filter to bring up the shadowed areas and add a little more crispness to the contrast.

( Don't worry if you don't have an extensive B&W filter plugin. If you just convert it to grey scale, you can go into Levels and adjust the midtone slider to the right to brighten them, then go into Brightness and Contrast and lower the contrast a lot, and the brightness just a little. That will get you pretty close.)

Then I duplicated that layer, changed it to "Overlay" (which made the picture very contrasty).

From there I chose the High Pass filter" and brought the pixel radius up to about 48 pixels to grab a lot of area and not a lot of detail.

After that, I inverted that layer and the picture got very flat and smooth looking. From there, I lowered the opacity of that layer to 48% and the water droplets and the other details smoothed out a little bit. This is what I came out with.

[glick]

I really like Brett's edited image.

[WVCoalMiner]

I guess you guys ran her off as she posted this on 7/29/09 and never posted again LOL