Enhancing a photo?

I'm not good at changing backgrounds, but I was playing with this picture and decided that the curtains need to be changed. How do you change the background? I changed the whole picture to sepia tones but they blend in too much with the curtains. If the background could go let's say sepia or black and white and the people were sharpened some, wouldn't that work?

Can anyone tell me why my picks I post end up as a red x after a little while??

Here's a workup - tried to increase the intensity in the red & green channels via the apply commands and reduced the noise in the blue channel

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/png'

that looks a whole hell of a lot better thank you

i like the sepia version to

i might be a bit late, but here's one that involves no blurring, no brushing, and hopefully still has 95% of the image data still there...

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/png'