Damien Symonds

That's excellent news. You've grown a lot in this short thread. Just wait until you take Levels. Your growth will blow you away.

But the bottom one is much more similar to the three examples you showed me. Have you changed your mind about your taste? (That's perfectly ok, I hate the bottom one.)

There is, but unfortunately not in Elements. Can you send me the scan so I can do it for you?

Do either of them speak to you?

Really? I used one at about R200 G30 B30 and it looked plenty red.

Gosh, that's nowhere near as red as the sample links you gave me.

Terrific! So, let's try something simple first. Add a darkish red Solid Color layer immediately above the Blurred layer, and clip it thereto. Then play with blend modes (and tweaking the colour of the red). I found that Soft Light mode looked pretty good.

No, I mean a screenshot from Photoshop. Showing your layers panel and everything.

At this point, may I see a screenshot including your layers panel?

The Lasso is what I always use for this. It's fast and effective.

There's no doubt it'll be fiddly, but there's a chance it might be easier than you think. Go ahead and do your clean processing on the raw file, then post the photo for me and we'll discuss.

That's excellent, except I think your gradient on the mask when a little too high. To just above her elbows would have been fine, I think?

Yay!

Yeah, go for it. It should help performance.

Then may I see a screenshot again?

Not as blurred as I expected.

The arms and chair and books probably should have been cloned out altogether. In fact, to be ultra safe, it might have been better to clone the child out altogether. The radius of the cloning has to be bigger than that of the blur, you see.

Sorry, forget it. It's simply impossible.

You can't have multiple cloning layers. It has to be just one layer.

The best you could do would be to lower the Lightness slider of a Hue/Saturation layer to maybe -65 or so, to darken it a lot. The pattern would still be pretty apparent, though.

By the way, which technology type are you choosing? http://www.damiensymonds.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/07i1dppc02.gif I'd expect it to be Wide Gamut CCFL, unless you have better information. Also, is this the only screen you have connected to your computer? Also, do you have any other computers in the house you can try calibrating, to make sure the calibrator itself isn't faulty?

Granddad's, yes. Grandma's, no.

Ok ... so ... just follow the troubleshooting part of my instructions.

I don't know what you expect me to say. GET IT RIGHT IN RAW. DO NOT MOVE TO PHOTOSHOP UNTIL IT IS PERFECT. IF IT IS NOT PERFECT, START OVER. DO NOT USE THAT SHITTY CAMERA RAW FUNCTION IN PHOTOSHOP.

No, I really need you to spell it out for me. What background?