Asher Kelman said:
Anyone want to tackle the blown out arm and shirt too? My solution was the added shadow pattern of a tree.
The blown out details can tackled via a mixture of calculations and curves to get a mask of the blown out areas (multiply the red and green channels to get an alpha channel and then use curves to shift the midtones close to black).
Using this mask, create curves adjustment layer to darken the image. Next, add noise to the layer mask and then fade this using multiply mode so the curves adjustment to darken the blown detail is now filtered with some noise to create texture. Blur the layer mask slightly (Gaussian blur radius 3 for this scale) and fade this in multiply mode (again, so only blown detail is affected). While this fails to create detail, it does take the blown detail and adds enough texture to make it look bright but not blown.
Other than that, this is a mixture of selective increases saturation, selective background blur to isolate the girls and leaf, plus a crop. Time, 10 or 15 minutes which is mostly masking work. I can post a PSD for those who want to see the process (top to bottom progressive layer tweaks).
The final dash of magic was to take the layer mask for the saturation, copy the saturated magic leaf, hit it with the motion blur filter, make 5 copies of the blurred version and selectively merge the, then transform that into a curve using the polar coordinates filter, and the tweaking it using free transform to blend with the composition.
While special effects were not requested, they do give it more of a magic touch.
enjoy,
Sean (ever the realist who can branch out with direction)