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[FocusingOnFlorida]

Lovely lady TJ. The lighting looks pretty good, but your photo looks a bit soft. I did a little PP on it this morning. I bumped up the highlights about +12, midtones up about +8, and shadows down about -2. I ran it through Noise Ninja and increased the color saturation by about +13. Not positive on exact number of the last one.

[FocusingOnFlorida]

Wow, much better...


Quote from: FocusingOnFlorida on Today at 06:48:32 AM
midtones up about +8,


Could you elaborate on that one? are you talking about by using curves?

I used ULEAD's PhotoImpact while editing that one. It has another adjustment for midtone. There are things that I love about this program over PhotoShop, but then again there are things I prefer in PhotoShop such as the Unsharp mask. PhotoImpact has presets and I prefer more control.

But, I didn't see my original as being "soft" and don't see the new one as any "sharper" What you might be seeing as "soft" was a slight skin blurring I did, which was intentional (note that her eyes, lips, necklace and hair were sharp).The edit is much better though. I had to play around with the white balance, temperature etc to get rid of the "pink" I've complained about when photographing her, that I seem to get no matter what I do in terms of a good white balance etc.

On both my work computer and home computer, I see a difference in sharpness. You may be right, it could be your blurring effect.

[FocusingOnFlorida]

I think the PS equivalent of adjust midtones would be to use curves(?)

I have curves in PhotoImpact as well. I just like the fine tuning on the midtones that I get with Highlight, Midtone, and Shadow.

Also I'm wondering how noise and softness are related... thought they were different things.

When reducing noise in any program, sharpness is degraded as well. This will cause a loss of detail that if overdone can relate to softness. Noise Ninja uses a complex algorithm to reduce noise while trying to maintain sharpness and detail. It does perform very well in "most" circumstances.