Damien Symonds

Well, with a mammoth amount of patience you could probably clone it out. But you'd need to find suitable eyelashes from another photo.

I'm on my phone at the moment. Are you saying that the snapseed edit has made things grainy and poor quality? The original quality was quite good.

It's done, mate.

Didn't you say you want to print it at 12" square?

Excellent!

Excellent! And is the snapseed version still 3024 wide?

Hey, that's pretty good quality, isn't it? And what are its pixel dimensions?

Tiffs are fine too, but they're just damned inconvenient. Why scroll all the way down to "T" in the file format list when Adobe defaults to PSD every time? Save your time.

Doesn't matter. Optimized and Progressive are unreliable, you can't be certain that every program will view them properly. Standard is the only one to use, ever. Size is irrelevant. No no no no no no no no no no no no no. ONLY save your master files as PSD, and ONLY use Bridge to view your files. After the job is printed, paid and put to bed, you can convert your PSDs to jpegs for archiving. But while the job is live, you MUST save PSDs.

Brian will have better wisdom than me. But here's my 2 cents ... even if you get two screens exactly the same, it's very likely that they won't show exactly the same colour, even after calibration. You'll find that one calibrated better than the other. So that one would be your editing screen, and the other one would be your secondary screen, for emails and such. So because of that, I've never thought it to be entirely necessary to have two matching screens. However, I'm aware of the attraction of having two matching screens sitting on your desk - it sure does look smart And strictly speaking, the two monitors don't even need to be the same size. (Mine certainly aren't.) But again - it looks nice if they do

May I see the full original (not cropped) and also a 100% crop from it so I can see the quality?

NEVER use Progressive. Ever. Only Baseline Standard. The Quality setting is a moot point. You always change that setting to suit the particular photo you're saving, and the purpose for which you're saving it. (You'll learn more about this in the Print Sharpening Class.) So even if you can manage to get a default to stick, it won't matter, because you'll need to change it most times anyway. This NEVER happens. There is not a single circumstance where you would legitimately open a jpeg file then save it again as a jpeg file. If you're doing this, something is wrong with your workflow. Please elaborate on your situations so we can fix the problem.

This one is a bit more exaggerated, yes. But still in no way related to the Aleksey editing style.

Definitely not the same technique. The Noelle one is good light, and more or less good clean processing, but a bit over-the-top with the editing on things like the teeth. Mainly it's beautiful because of the wonderfully blurred background (do you have a lens which can achieve it?) cleverly changed in colour slightly to be harmonious with the child's clothing. If you can provide a suitably-located, suitably-posed and suitably-lit photo, I can help you with the editing. But in essence, it will edit itself. This is more a question of photography, really. The Aleksey one genuinely is an editing question. He's spent quality time with D&B to get that look. (But of course the lighting in the photo plays a big role too.) Dodging the highlights in the hair, the lower irises, the lips ... and burning arms etc. Your photo is a little more side-lit than his, but I think it has potential. Once we've done the normal clean processing on yours, it will be fun to try the D&B. So let's discuss it in class first, then we'll come back here.

Yes ma'am.

Hue/Sat on Colorize is often how I've done it too. This looks good.

It would be useful if you could provide them with a normal print (eg 8x10 lustre) from your regular lab, and say "I want it to look like this".

Yes, definitely raise this with them.

I'm relatively relieved. It sounds like it's a fairly good result. But if you have the means to do so, it would be great to talk to them about the blues and greens, and see what they suggest.

This was always the concern. Not knowing which CMYK to convert to meant that it was extremely likely there'd be some colour problems. I'm glad the wheat looks good. Are you able to talk to them about your colour concerns? Gosh this must have been a frustrating hour for you!

Can you give me a few minutes? I need to re-read our thread so I can remember what else we discussed.

Yes, blurry (when viewed up close) is exactly what we were hoping for. If it was a highway billboard, either pixelated or blurry would have been sufficient, because nobody gets out of their car to look at a highway billboard closely. But people are going to be closer to this, so I think blurry is better than pixelated. This is excellent news. Wonderful!

Razor sharp, don't worry.

No, but of course check its results very carefully.

Sorry, that layer is the first one you must make. THEN make the other two below it, and the Hue/Sat above it.