Newbie Help with pic !!

[corina]

Can anyone help with this pic it looks very gray and flathttp://farm3.static.flickr.com/2253/1558275460_6fd85628d6_b.jpg

[PixelMagic]

Is this a greyscale conversion of a color photo? If so, perhaps it would be better to post the color version.

[tonydee]

One problem is that the brightest shade of grey you have is still along way short of being white. You can get a noticable improvement just by using an Layers / Colours / Auto / Stretch Contrast (in the Gimp - free download from http://www.gimp.org - but if you use PS it's sure to have the same somewhere). Layers / Colours / Auto / Normalise gives (near?) identical results.

[bckane]

Corina, I dont know looks good on my monitor. The only thing I see is maybe a liitle dark around the babies hairline. Here I used the dodge tool and lighten the midtones around the head area
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a276/bckane/baby.jpg

[corina]

-fedka, I used the b/w setting on my camera. I know i should taken it in color then coverted it in ps, (newbie) but i didnt.
-thanks tonydee
-bckane it looks great ! thank you so much.

[OL9245]

Nice capture!
I gave it a try.
Levels to bring back some pure white.
Curves to darken back the mid-shadows.

Edit: was not glad with the result. ad these:
at this point I get a more contrasty image, but the baby skin has lost all smoothness and many hair were lost either.

get back the hair by blending with the original with a gradient mask (diagonal)
Smooth the baby skin with high-pass/blur/invert/linear-light@50% filter (see tuto here (http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=213)) blend to taste with layer mask.
220119