Blue group--Lesson 4--Fixing Mike and Lulu

For this project, I used a picture of my daughter Lulu and my brother Mike. Janee asked us to open a partially closed eye, but I figured I could go one better on that (who, me? competitive?)--and besides, I don't have any other recent pix of Lulu with my brother.

First, I did Lulu's eyes. I found some eyes in another photo that were turned at about the right angle and were about the same size, and then I copied them using the Lasso tool and pasted them into this photo.

The eyes are about 2 or 3 pixels too low, but I couldn't get them just right using the Move tool--they kept snapping too high or too low. Any suggestions about how to avoid that would be appreciated.

Then I used the Healing Brush, the Spot Healing brush, and the Clone tool to blend them in with the rest of the eye socket.

Then I went to work on my brother. He'd just come back from a weeklong boat trip around the Puget Sound, and he obviously thinks sunscreen is for sissies! So I wanted to lighten him up a bit. I couldn't get him the right color with a Curves or Levels layer, but a Hue/Saturation layer worked just great. (I give credit to my friend Marie for figuring that one out--she heard me whining about it and suggested I try it.)

One question: I didn't sharpen the photo, because I couldn't figure out which layer to sharpen. Sharpening the adjustment layer didn't work, and sharpening the background layer left out the eyes. ???

Anyway, this was hard work, but in the end, worth it--it's a much better picture now. But if anyone has any suggestions about how to make it better, I welcome them. When I'm satisfied with it, I want to send it to my brother, so if you can see any improvements that need to be made, feel free to pass them along :)