I had Christmas dinner with good friends in Bethesda. While there I, naturally, annoyed everyone by taking pictures. I managed to get a couple of pretty good shots of their daughter, Anna. It looks like I'll need three or four more dinners to be sure I get good pics of everyone.

PS - There are multiple versions (color, b&w, sepia or duotone) of two different shots. In both shots, the color version, including background treatment was done first. The basic steps were crop, slight tonal adjustment, remove some stray hairs and facial blemishes with clone stamp (normal blending, 50% opacity), sharpen (USM); select just the facial area and copy to a new layer; gaussian blur on that new layer; reduce layer opacity to about 30%; erase area of eyes and lips to permit the sharpened image to show through. Remove background (various selection tools. Insert two layers under facial image. Fill lower layer with deep blue. Set colors to white and black and render clouds for the second layer. Reduce upper layer (clouds) opacity to mix with the underlying blue layer to produce a dark blue mottled background. (For other image, a black/white clouds was blended with pure black for a similar effect.) Produce colorized (hue/saturation/colorize) version and then a black & white version with color mixer. Run DownRez & Frame action to prepare for pbase.

Other Versions:


http://www.pbase.com/dsteinauer/image/37878046