When taking pictures for the individual member's page, I noticed that Kim had blinked her eyes on the first photograph (a great advantage of a digital camera with a "play-back" screen), and so took another one. Eyes open this time.
However, when back at home and preparing Kim's page, I felt the first photograph was much the better of the two, except for her closed eyes. So I set to work with my image manipulation software, Photodesk Light (a fantastic application - highly recommended) to see if I could do something about it, as follows:
First I had to rotate the second picture a tiny amount to align her eyes with the first picture, as she had titlted her head slightly more in the second photograph. Then I enlarged it just enough so that the outside edges of her eyes were exactly the same size apart in both pictures (yes, I was into counting individual pixels at this point!). I then used the airbrush tool set with a small nozzle, and the with the cloning function of the package, I "copied" the eyes from the second photograph onto the first. I was delighted with the results. A bit of tidying up next with "removal" of a cold sore below her nose, that the poor lass was suffering from at the time (better than make-up, this :-). I decided the shadow (to the left of her head) was unwanted, so I airbrushed it out the by cloning nearby areas of background colour. I improved the quality of the photograph with Photodesk's "enhance" and "gamma-adjust" tools to sharpen the image and improve the colour quality. All this was done on the full sized originals (the above samples are only a small portion of the originals, shown at a quarter of the size I was working on). So I finished off by cropping the section of the touched up photograph that I wanted to use, and scaled it down to the correct size for the web page. The finished image looks like this:
So there we have Kim complete with her lovely smile and open eyes. I hope you agree with me, that the final result was well worth the effort I put into it.
