My Daughter Laila

I love the way this came out..thought I share.

Could benefit from some post processing on skin tones, exposure... did you alter her iris?

I actually did process this thru CS5, I did not touch the skin tones at all. I did alter the iris using the dodging tool. any help on how to process the skin tones is appreciated.

Yeah her skin tone is really cold because her face is in the shade even though most of the image is in daylight. Shade has a bluish cast because the light is from the sky (bluish) rather than the sun (yellowish/orangish). In ACR (if you shot raw), just use the temp tool either custom setting or pick between Shade and Cloudy. In CS5, I'd mask just for her face and use a either a color balance layer or hue/sat layer.

Aside from that, she is kind of close / the crop cuts off the top of her head but I know with kids sometimes that can be hard to control.

GORGEOUS little girl you have there!

I agree with the skin needing a little work....but I like the crop
I'm a momma and sometimes ya just want them upclose! lol...plus I tend to shoot very tight crops with my children, when I shoot other family session I shoot a little different as I know my close crops are not always what they want.

Nice image, I would warm it a bit. Also I see a brown/hazer eye and a green one? They need to be the same color both, unless that's how they are in real life. :P

added a warming filter...

Just need to skin soften. There are several videos on YouTube or you can look up some how-to's on here to help go through the process in CS5. It's just a matter of making a layer mask, bluring the layer, adjusting the opacity and then using the brush tool to go over the eyes, lips and nose.

You can also take advantage of the spot healing brush tool to remove some of the hairs from the picture.

For my tastes, this is very over done. The contrast level is cranked up way too high as well as the saturation levels. Also for me I don't think the lens flare down the middle of her face is too attractive. Do you have the original image to post for comparison to what you've done?

Maybe you don't have a calibrated computer screen so you're developing photos blindly not seeing the true brightness, contrast, and colors of the image.