Damien Symonds

The background, of course!!!!! The white looks hideous.

Oh, no, that looks awful!

Oh yes, much better.

Ok, well, that's something at least.

Does it do the same with a mouse?

Yeah, alas, that's a significant difference You'll need to ditch this one.

Well no, your specs look good. I see nothing there to suggest you'd have trouble liquifying. My best suggestion is, don't try to liquify the whole image. Draw a selection with your marquee tool around the head, then run liquify only on that area. It should help.

Here's the PSD file

A little bit of liquify first, then handyman. Hold on, I'll upload the PSD ... Interesting. Could you do this for me?

Do you think she'd be ok with this?

By the way, what quality level did you choose when saving the jpeg file to upload here? It must have been very low, it's awfully blocky.

Liquify would only play a very small role here. It'll be mostly Handyman Method. Here's another example. If you can allow me a few minutes, I'll have a play.

I agree with Crystal - the plausibility will be very difficult. The only chance, as I see it, is if you have another photo or two of the quilt by itself, without any people in front of it. Did you take any test shots of the setup before you assembled the people?

I agree, it's the eyes. Too flat. Everything else looks awesomely awful.

And if you're asking about the focus, post in this section.

Thanks. Now also show me a 100% crop from the most in-focus area of grass.

You'll need to slightly mask off the index finger, because it's glowing like crazy. Otherwise, I think you've done well.

Ah, bugger. Ok, let's try to figure it out for ourselves. Is it just the photo on the home page you're concerned about? How about the galleries?

Download the PSD Of course do it on your whole image. NEVER crop during editing.

Would this be ok?

As long as you never resized or cropped your PSDs, you're absolutely fine.

Oh yes, great! That's looking very promising.

Ok, super. It'll probably involve Multiply blend mode, but may I see the SOOR, just to check if there's any colour channel cleverness we can pursue?

Have you read this? http://www.damiensymonds.net/2010/02/trash-those-jpegs.html

Generally it's a matter of brightening with Levels in the usual way, then adding warming filter.