Thanks for the feedback MD.
The borders is just a phase I seem to be going through! I am sure it will pass!
Here is the before and after for that image. You'll see just how wrong I had my settings. I was trying to keep my shutter speed high to deal with the camera shake issues I have but I think I needed to drop it way more.

My aim with the PP was to create a soft hazey dreamy kind of feel.

Terrific PP work, LM. Do you have a "skin smoothening" program or did you do it manually?

I do have an action, but most of that was done manually - there was a LOT of smoothing to do!
I added a blurred layer over the top, masked out the bits I wanted to keep sharp then fiddled with the opacity until it was about right.

This is a handy action for a bit of smoothing:
Coffee Shop Perfect Portrait

Yup!

Fantastic example of PP work on a not so fantastic original image.

And thanks for sharing the Coffee Shop Action with us too. I'm sure that will come in very handy indeed.

Looking back over your images, I can see you've used it a quite a lot

I was wondering, of the images you post, how far away are they from the original image? Do you always have to edit them like the baby picture above, or is this simply a look and style that you like?

Like I said in my previous post, I really really like what you're doing, and if this is indeed the style your settled on, go with it, because your turning out beautiful results.

That was the look I wanted for this picture. I wasn't exactly what I had in mind but firstly the baby's skin had got a lot worse, and secondly I messed up my settings.
I quite like the soft skin and sharp eyes look for babys and young children, but I often do that by hand rather than relying on the action - I usually add a masked layer with a high pass filter to sharpen eyes and a masked layer with gaussian blur to soften skin, then use a soft, low opacity brush set to lighten eye whites and the the burn tool to darken /sharpen eyelashes. I do that to most portraits at the moment as it is the skill I am trying to perfect. An action I do use to help wityh that is one I found somewhere that creates masked duplicate layers as I am in Elements and can't do that otherwise.
I don't think I have used the portrait action in many pictures in this thread. Maybe a bit in last weeks one, but I did loads and loads to that picture!!!!! I was in an exploring kind of mood!

Some lovely work there with the baby portrait.

beautifull well done

Lovely PP!
xx

Its nearly Chriiiiiiiiiiiiiistmas!
So here is my Christmas Angel dreaming of sugar plums!





(Sorry about the borders - I still like them for my web uploads at the moment!)

Lovely Em, the borders suit these two shots I'm forever fiddling like that too, I think most pics look better against dark colours, I wish Flickr was black and not white.

Anyway , lovely shots Em, she looks very peaceful

I was speaking to my niece this morning same age as Hattie, and she was full of everything Xmasand then randomly asked me to draw her a Panda pic and post it