Topic: a bad orginal, though talking image

[headlights]

His gf is very talented designer and did take this shot with a point and shoot.

Photography is not here thing. But still she loves him and she has eyes.

I do not even think of posting my first tries on this image.
Perhaps you have idea's on this one.

[Greg Groess]

Highlights,

Please give us some goals you would like to have for the image. 

Personally I can see that it needs a pass with smart sharpen, it needs a skin correction which could be done in Curvemeister with a Skin Mask and a mid-tone skin pin, The foreground road is completely blown out with no details; it will need to be cloned back into the image.  the overall color balance needs a bit of a tweak...

What things are you looking to improve and then we'll have a bash at it...

Greg

[headlights]

Greg,

thnx ,  i ll work with your tips. ok?

Regards,

Martijn

[Greg Groess]

Headlights,

Here is my version of the image...

In shot 1: I show the image with the road cloned into a separate layer.  I copied a section of the road and pasted it into a new layer.  I used the "Skew" command to stretch the copied area out over the blown area and then set the layer opacity to 65%.  I then used a eraser tool with a soft brush to erase out the areas of the copied layer that covered the green spots near the middle.

In Shot 2: I flattened the layers and opened the image in Curvemeister to do a RGB correction using the highlights in the trees I found a spot that I thought should be white and corrected the highlights to that spot.  I picked a mid-tone spot and corrected in RGB to make that neutral.  I picked a spot in the hairline to check the shadows and found the hair to be blue.  I corrected the hairline spot to be in the skin tone range but very dark so that the man does not have blue hair. 

In Shot 3: I applied smart sharpen as shown with the settings you see in the screen shot. 

Shot 4 is where I left the image for now.

Greg