My little grandson also has a tiny vein in the same place, which has become less noticable over time. But I practiced a lot on the skin between his eyes when he was a little baby! I used the Patch Tool on your photo, then I ran a skin smoothing action to blend it all nicely.

I lightened the photo quite a bit, and reduced the yellows and red tones.

I ran the burn tool very lightly over her lash line and sharpened the eyes slightly.

I cropped off center, close to the rule of thirds.

Here is a link to my edit:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/artfromtheheart/3513737355/

Thank you for sharing this darling photo with us today! By the way, the photos in your header are absolutely beautiful.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3645/3514301016_8a8898d6ce_o.jpg

I smoothed the skin using Portraiture, at only 15%. Decreased the yellow and the red, and sharpened using MCP’s crystal clear. and that’s it. It’s a beautiful photo!

~Angie
co-founder of iHeartFaces

What a sweet photo to submit today. It really has a lot going for it and features a super-cute little one as well.

My first thought was that the photo needed to be brighter. Because of that, I was drawn to your last edit more…but didn’t really care for the “glowy” look in that edit. That is just my personal preference though. There are probably 8,000 other people around here who would love the glow.

Here is the first edit I did which brightened the baby but wasn’t cropped down at all: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thearthurclan/3513948530/

After I saw that photo in Flickr, I started to think the little foot behind the baby might be a little distracting so I then did a 5×7 crop: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thearthurclan/3513951728/

You really can’t go wrong with this shot. It’s a beautiful one!

~Angie
co-founder of iHeartFaces

I think the sharpness issue comes from not sharpening for web. There are lots of ways to do this. My favorite is to resize my photo to 640 pixels on the long side and then do an unsharp mask of 350/.2/0. It looks better on flickr because they apply some sharpening to web images in the upload.

I did play as acceptance of your invitation . Here is a color edit:
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y286/NanasMama/Babyedit.jpg

And a b/w:
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y286/NanasMama/Babyeditbw.jpg

I lightened it considerably, ran Coffeeshop’s Perfect portrait. Used the skin softening on about 45% and the color pop at 10%. I deleted all the rest of the layers. I cloned the two spots above her eyebrows that made her look worried. I burned the light spot between her eyebrows. I did an eye trick and some curves work. Sharpened for web and finished. The b/w conversion is just a gradient map with a bump in curves.

I hope this helps!
Amanda J.

I don’t know why, but for some reason the way you posted it on your blog, it’s very pixelated and blurry. You may consider fixing that so that you don’t wind up with lots of comments similar to the first one.