Daughter at play

Hi Dan, Beautiful girl!! Nothing to change there at all !!!

What you could change to the image depends upon what you want to present or preserve. Whether you want a cleaned up image, or an image that is not cleaned up; whether you want a cleaned up image that doesn't look cleaned up, etc. For a child, I start with her eyes, face and hair. The rest either provides context or adds or detracts from the image. Suppose you wanted to clean it up a bit. Here, I would first get rid of what she had for lunch. If the marks on her face are permanent, I would leave them, otherwise I would get rid of them, because in a week they will be gone anyway. I would next reduce the shadows under her eyes, but not completely. Darken her neck very slightly under the chin to give the image more dimension. If you wanted to present a cleaned up image, this screams out for cropping. The slats on the left of the image are a distraction and there is a metal ring above her head that would have to be removed or cropped away. When cropping, keep in mind (but not be a slave to) the rule of thirds, because it makes a difference. Consider also whether tilting the image to the right or left would enhance her image. After cropping, start with some saturation. You can do this using a simple contrast slider. Higher contrast would definitely help this image, especially her eyes, eyebrows, hair and lips. You can also limit the contrast to those specific areas. I would then work on each eye individually. They look good here, but they could be made to look better without making it appear that you did so. Using multiple layers, clean up the whites and the irises, remove glare and enhance the catchlights. Then bring the opacity sliders for these changes down so that the eyes look great but natural, so only you and another good photographer would know you made changes (without comparing it to the original, that is). You can do lots with her hair. At a minimum, it needs some contrast for texture and the light on the right side is too much. You could use multiple layers to enhance both the colors, contrast and richness of her hair, not by adding color, but simply by painting in or painting away the light that is already there. Using just the natural light in her hair, you could make her hair in this image look anywhere from "just plain wonderful" to "Cinderella's night out gorgeous". As you adjust her hair, you could adjust slightly the tones of her face. For example, you could increase the shadows on the right side of her face (away from the sun) to add more dimension. Most of the adjustments I'm referring to would be isolated to specific areas of the image. No matter, with a portrait, you must always be careful about the skin tones. Here, there appears to be too much yellow and not enough blue. If you ever wanted to get into it, there is something called CMYK guidelines that most of the high end portrait photographers use to check the tones of a person's skin (they are guidelines only, but can be extremely useful). It's far too easy to miss-judge or miss tones that are out of balance. When I do my editing, I repeatedly check the tone values of the face in several places, especially as I near completion of the image. Every change to an image, including simple changes to brightness and contrast, will change the skin tones. By this I mean the relative mixture of red/cyan, green/magenta and blue/yellow and the relative balance of each of those mixtures using the simple curves adjustment in PS. In the end, you want the skin tones to look natural. You could then start toning down the colors and light of the background around her head and deepen the green and reduce the light of her shirt, getting rid of the burn on her left shoulder. This will help enhance her face and keep the attention off of the background. From there, make additional changes as you see them to enhance the image. If you ever wanted to learn portraiture, you have a gem of a daughter to use. With some simple shots of your daughter and some deft photoshop changes, you could create some of the most beautiful portraits on photonet, and you would be preserving many wonderful images of your daughter in the process. Oh, always shoot in RAW. Hope this wasn't too much. Good luck. David

Thanks for the Critique. Relative PS newbie so I'll try and do your suggestions.

Normally she's a blur of motion, so I was lucky to get this moment of stillness. Added several others into the portfolio if you'd like to take a gander at those as well.

FYI, these are some of my first shots with my (new to me) Canon D60 DSLR.

Thanks!

attached is redo of image with some of the suggestions you made.

Better?

Dan, I believe you were definitely working in the right direction. I made some additional edits without using any exotic tools or plugins. David