Damien Symonds

Did you find this one?

Before/after:

Then I recommend a bit of gentle cloning to reduce the remaining crease in the skin:

That gets you to here:

Then you can nudge up the pudgy part using as big a brush as you need, and only the pudgy part gets moved:

Yes, this is definitely a Liquify job.

To my mind, the key is to use the mask tool before you start.  Block off everything that you don't want to move, like this:

You needed to have her turn her face towards the light more.  The nose shadow is much too strong.

Also, it needs the darker background.

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.

11 hours ago, Jennifer said:

I work on my files on the portable Dell.

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?

2 minutes ago, Jennifer said:

Seems to be working now, but my first question is - is all this ok? 

Yes.  It's absolutely fine to leave all Graphics Processor stuff turned off.

2 minutes ago, Jennifer said:

2nd question while I'm in this menu - under the general section - there's a box that says "apply sharpening to all images" and the scroll down option is to "preview images only."  Which one should I have checked?

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.

4 minutes ago, Jennifer said:

3rd question - under the camera raw cache, it has the max size set to 1GB. I thought I read somewhere that if you lower this, it will speed bridge up - not sure if I read it here or somewhere else. Should I leave this where it is?

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.