Hah. Love the expression! And, the hat is awesome! Up close, the skin textures look good. Mouth and tongue are great. It's just the shaders that are off in this one. Fix that and give the contrast in the overall image a boost, and I think it'd be quite lovely.

For a crocheted cardigan, most of that would be in the tex maps, you're right. The pale green shirt in the other render would make a fine cardigan, I'd think, with the right tex maps. I wonder if I can come up with something in Filter Forge. If I get something workable, I'll post it here. I know I can do knits and wool that look pretty decent.

When it comes to Nik Software, I've found that the only thing that works to figure it out is to experiment like mad. And if you get a result you like -- save the recipe. One of my favorites filters at the moment is in Color EF -- Sunlight. And I use Pro Contrast as the last filter in a recipe just about every time.

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PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.