Damien Symonds

Were you specifically googling for a tutorial for Elements?

Well, the photo on the right is too blurry, so let's concentrate on the left one. I think you should crop with him a bit more centred, and if there's a bit of the lady in the frame, you should be able to clone her out.

Oh, this is REALLY bad. External drives are for archiving and backup only. They're not fast enough for working from. Only use internal drives for live jobs.

I hope so, yes. May I see a closeup?

@Miss Sally, how did you go?

Yes. It's absolutely fine to leave all Graphics Processor stuff turned off. I think it should be on "all images". I don't think it's a good idea to have a difference between preview and output, if you know what I mean. How many hard drives do you have on your computer? I have left my cache at 1GB, but made a cache folder on D drive instead, so it doesn't interfere with the programs running on C drive. I don't know how technically correct this is, but it seems to work ok for me.

You are correct. When following my calibration instructions, treat it as a laptop. Your calibrator purchase might depend on the uncalibrated state of the screen. I discussed it here.

No, sorry.

First question, have you tried Frequency Separation? I think it's ideal for this kind of thing.

Yes, finish the wedding first.

Once you fix all the masking it'll be ok. But leave some more shadow on the wall at the left side. It doesn't need to be so bright.

Yeah, that might work! Have you given it a try?

Hi Nick, may I see a 100% crop of the worst area?

Definitely start here. By the way, I'm going to move this post into Brian's Mac section, where he'll be able to help you better than I can.

No, scrap it.

Yes, exactly what Kim said.

Regarding the actual skin issue, did you try the Dust & Scratches filter? It's very fast, and does a fair job for very little effort. This was with the values of 20/5:

Obviously it's necessary (though difficult) for me to accept that not everyone wants their photos to be good, so I'll drop the noise thing. The next problem you have is the colour space. Please follow this to fix it.

Yes, and you said grey was an option. The next step is to add a Hue/Saturation layer, and clip it (Cmd Opt G) to the Channel Mixer layer. Then lower its Lightness slider to your taste.

No! You don't need new prints. Any recent prints you have are fine.

They look ok. The next thing we need to discuss is the light in your room.

Lol, yeah, invert the mask!

Nobody is talking about overprocessing.

Yes, for heaven's sake don't get a Mac. http://www.damiensymonds.net/2015/07/buying-mac-or-pc.html

As a first step, add a Channel Mixer adjustment layer, check the "Monochrome" checkbox, and enter 0, +100, 0 for the three values. Then mask it onto the shirt. Show me the result. You'll find you don't need to be too precise with your masking around the hair. That's the beauty of this method. You will need to be precise with a small brush along the straighter edges. Use this.