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Hi Dawid, 

Thanks for sending in this portrait.

One of the first things I am going to comment on is the title. I started off my photography career as a keen amateur in the camera club scene, and titles were a big part of the process. Every slide or print needed a name, and more often than not it was some kind of description as to what you should be seeing in the photo. Sadly, the title was usually a crutch for a rather average image.

That is not to say this is a bad photo… but as I look at this image, I see anything but a wild child; If this was me, I would just simply call the image what it is, a portrait of my daughter. Other people will look at this image and decide for themselves what they think, and from what I can tell, there won’t be many bad opinions.

One thing  I would do with this image is to lighten the left side of your daughter's face (as we look at the picture). One of the simplest ways to do this is to use the Lasso Tool in Photoshop, set it to a rather loose feather of about 50 pixels, and then select everything from the left of her nose, up to the top of her forehead, across to the check line and back up to the nose.

Now, on the Layers panel, select a new adjustment layer for Curves and then pull the middle of the curves graph up slightly. This will lighten the mid-tones in the left of the face. The advantage of using a Curves layer is that you can adjust the mask using a large soft brush tool to refine the image.

If you wanted, you could also try lightening the eye, and then play with the overall contrast of the image. For the moment, the photo just seems a bit flat.

If you have captured this image in RAW mode, you should make these  adjustments in a RAW convertor like Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) or Capture One.

As you mentioned in your note though, this is an image that should just be enjoyed for what it is. What you will find as you start to play with the tonality of the image is that there are dozens of potential variations!

Cheers for now,

Anthony

 

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