I've been working on this for the last couple of nights, and now I don't know if it's finished or not. I tried mixing in some textures in the background, but it took away from the simplicity of it all. Also tried various layers and options with the orginal color and that didn't do anything for me either. So, any suggestions????

This has a lovely soft effect & I do like the colours, the focus seems to be on the eyes but I feel there needs to be some variation in the blur to give it a bit more focus & less of a flat feel.... does that make sense?!

I like what you did. i hope you dont mind that i played with it a bit. what i did was take 2 images,then sharpen one, while the other i toook into color pencil and did a strong effect on it. then i layered the 2 images together. hope that was okay with you. :)

yea, that's interesting bonbon. I can see her eyelashes a lot better on yours. I think I'll play around some more on this tonight. And Bev, I didn't blur anything. It looks so soft due to the highly feathered cutouts, and low opacity levels on some of the layers. A BUNCH of layers it is, but no blur tool. Also, the original was a fairly sharp photograph. If anybody else has any ideas on what to do Id love to hear them!

What a beautiful image Marshall! Your daughter? I also like what bonbon has done...seems to have more depth now.

well i took your suggestion bev as to the sharp and soft. so i guess it turned out pretty good lol. i tried doing a color enhancement but that made the hair more of a red than the blond and i assumed you wanted to keep to the origional colors. you have a beautiful daughter, Phrank... you might need a cannon on the porch for all the boyfriends!! :) psst: you can borrow mine

Nice image Prank some nice post work, If you are going to do more work on this I would focus on the eyes sorry no pun intended They seem very hard against the soft light feel of the rest of the image. :O)

wow, looks like it was done with color pencils...bob did a sweet job with it...good postwork phrank...