Damien Symonds

@solley

And where, exactly, is this pixelation?

That's nonsense, show me. Show me a 100% crop from the baby part of the photo, and from another in-focus part of the photo.

What??? Well duh! Everything looks pixely over 100%.

Hmmm ... let's diagnose ... First, can you confirm you're using File>Place to put the baby in the photo, not copy and paste or drag and drop?

Only if you have situations where the noise is SO bad it's beyond Adobe's capabilities. If you shoot very very low light venues, or something.

Ok, so follow the troubleshooting part of the instructions.

Are you saying the screen is cooler than the prints?

Ok, now tell me about the print comparison.

Well, the quality still looks good, so that's all that matters. I don't see a problem here.

They will be, somehow. Your job is to figure out how. Try turning Gamma off, for starters. Then look for other settings that might free them up.

http://www.damiensymonds.net/desktop-monitor-brightness

Ok, great! It must have been a noise issue, then. The colour one must have been pretty noisy. May I see 100% crops of both files?

No, I'd stick with 6500 for now.

I would leave it on.

Are you sure you didn't resize at the same time? Can you check their pixel dimensions in the File Properties section of the Metadata panel in Bridge?

Gee ... could you show me a photo of that setting?

Some drop is normal, but that sure does seem like a lot. What quality level did you save it at?

Gosh, good catch!! It is sRGB, but her Color Settings must be wrong.

No, not necessarily. I was just curious.

As I mentioned earlier, if you'd shot on a tripod, you might have had other options (ie HDR). But in this situation, just choose one of the files and process it in the usual way. Choosing which file to use is a balancing act. Brighter files are better quality (not so noisy) but darker files have more outdoors detail visible through the window, as you know. As it happens, in this case, the darker file has noticeably better focus than the brighter one, so that decision is more or less made for us. I processed the darker file in ACR, then did some Levels work, to get this: With more time, it would be possible to enhance the outdoor detail a little more, of course, but even as you see here, it's fairly visible.

Out of interest, why do you work with DNG files?

Now, add a Hue/Saturation layer, and clip it to that new forehead layer. Move the "Lightness" slider to about -50, then invert the mask to hide the adjustment. Then very patiently (with a very low opacity brush) paint to darken the new forehead, until it looks plausible. Particularly the right-hand side above the eyebrow, where it should be more shadowed.

Yeah!!!! I think that has great potential, as long as the focus is equivalent.

This will probably require a "skin graft" from her arm, but before we explore that, are you sure you don't have any other photos of her forehead without the hair, that could be used for a forehead swap?