Edit Me Challenge

Edit Me Challenge Week 1 (of 2012)!
The photo was tough, and I think I did a decent edit, but I missed it.......
I was going to submit on Saturday, but forgot. :-/

Anyway, here's the original and my edit:

I am not good at fixing lighting on my own photos, let alone this one. Look at that brightness! :o

This edit was the hardest I can recall ever doing. I tried SO hard to bring out the face, but failed (however, I see now that I did better than quite a few submissions, and the only one with a really good face uses CS5. Cheater! lol, jk). My methods here used contrasting, hue change, and a lot of small work you won't notice, hehe.

Main advantages of mine over the others? The sun spots!! I manually removed all of the main ones and de-colored the others, which makes it a very good edit in my opinion.
Main drawback? The face. I couldn't bring it out. the gal with Photoshop even made the eyes an awesome blue when you can't even tell in the original photo! :-P

Anyway, I hope to try again soon, and I would like any and all comments about this edit.

My cameras

Hey all, just decided to post on the cameras I used to take the pictures I'll get to posting.

The HP Photosmart R817 5.1MP 5x zoom (on the right) and the Canon PowerShot A3100 IS 12.1MP 4x zoom (on the left):

I really liked the HP one before it broke (it got dropped, lol, as you can see). It's much more ergonomic and it's interface is a ton easier to use than the Canon, so much so that I could operate it with one hand on a normal basis! I don't really need or use the full 12 megapixels on the Canon so I really should have got the next higher HP as a replacement instead.

Anyway, these are the cameras I used to take all my pictures. We got the Canon in April 2010 I think so anything in 2009 is from the HP.