Help with fire photograph

[jdjr87]

I need to be put in the right direction. What can I do to make this image more "clean" or crisp. To me it looks pixely, like low resolution. What I am trying to achieve is a black background and nice sharp flames and light off face.

 

[Hoogle]

Are you asking from a photography point of view or a photoshop fix.

If you only have this image to go on then you could do a curves adjustment layer to boost the midtones etc

and then create 2 new layers 1 for background and 1 for face
set the brush mode to lighten (not the layer only the brush) sample a colour from the skin and with about 20% opacity paint oer the face.

then choose black set the brush mode to darken and paint over the background layer again at abour 20% opacity

 

[Hoogle]

Forgot to add merge layers duplicate it and add unsharp mask filter to the duplicate layer and play with blending modes and opacity.

Will also like to point out the forum seems to increase the size of my images when uploading here so looks worse quality than it is as it is zoomed in