Thanksgiving with the Alts!

Like most people this year for thankgsgiving we spent it with some family. All sorts of pictures were taken and as usual there was talk of using the picture for this year's christmas card. The problem was that there weren't any pictures that were perfect enough to be used for christmas. So i told them we'd work it out and this is a tutorial on how that was done. Take a look at the before and after:

First of all the thing that always has to go is the infamouse red-eye.

I hadn't done alot of this so i of course hit the web. Here's a really good tutorial on how to remove the redeye with layers and layer blending... take a look:
     http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/photoshop/ht/apsredeye.htm
This is the result

the next step was to alter my neice's face seeing as in this pose everyone looked good except for her. So what I did was take this face

and then copied it into the root picture. I then sized it with "ctrl+t" to make it the right size. I then used the rubber stamp tool and painted in her smile, nose and eyes over the original picture in order to get this.

The next step was to take off the shine that was on my sister-in-laws face which I again hadn't really done before so i followed this tutorial
      http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=64087and
and that gave me this

the next step was to take the brightness down by just going to image>adjustment>brightness/contrast. I put the brightness down to like 30 and the contrast up to 20. This was almost the final step and made the picture look like this.

the last and final step was to put a dark edge around the outside. I did this by making a new layer and then using a black to clear gradiant just along the edges. After I added the gradiant I changed the opacity until I liked how it looked. The final product looks like this.