Lighting, Child, portrait, hair, vignetting, highlight/shadow tool, red eye, skin
I love the child with hair cure hairband and look back at you. Yes that's great, but is it fine? We're about "getting to great", not a mutual ooh and aah society! Just because the little girl is the cutest doesn't give us an excuse for holding back as it simply does not help anyone and is boring! Let's make this picture work! Frankly, the Unguru wouldn't touch this!

so here's my frank very basic but hardly sufficient or ultimate suggestions. Really one has to spend the effort
before taking the shot. Here you are totally forgiven!
She's not shown in golden light that justifes this precious child! O.K., so we have no special lighting skills*, but today, so what if you have only God's light and
photoshop. Simply using a few tools one can get most of the way.
1. Use CS3 adjustment from IMAGE in the toolbar and progressive parts of the dropdown menus:
-Adjustments
Highlighrt/Shadow
Adjust shadow seettings to bring the hair back.
2. Select the cushion at the left side and feather 30 pixels and copy to another layer. Select this layer and darken with
Levels and blur (Gaussuan Blur) and blend back (using multiply) with the original image to vignette (gently darken) 3/4 of the cushion and bring the eye to the beautiful child.
3. Correct hint of red eye
4. correct the blue hued areas on bridge of nose and her left temple (this is thin skin showing veins)
5. Remove blue hue from sclera of eyes
6. Use Hue/Sat tool or patch tool/healing brush or other technic to get rid of the linear purple shading of skin below her left eye.
7. Reduce size to 700 pixels wide (using Image Resize- bicubic Sharper) which is perfect for the impact of the image and all the detail that is there!!
Why do we have to do this? Photography is not about telling the truth since it doesn't exist and has no purpose. The job is to best present a child with her nature. The tweaks will not harm her character, I assure you! Let's see if anyone can do better! It's simple not acceptable to not be challenged! Wow! I really am not mean...
Asher
* Lighting has to be worked on! Just get several large white cards to reflect light and you will improve. Add an electric light with temp of 5000 degrees Kelvin and you have spent $5.00! Do better with flash used
only as fill at ~ 1/4 power. Best direct it to the white cards or ceiling not direct to the subject! Photoflex has inexpensive kits. The Strobist.com has great tips! Even spending hardly anything you should do better.