She was very happy with it. Thanks,
With regards to how I did it.. I worked the picture within an inch of its life! Don't remember everything but... the short and sweet of it started with the Dust&Scratch (very under rated tool) and level.
How I started:
Duplicate the picture Ctrl+J twice then turn off the background.
Worked on the top layer.
Go to noise / Dust & Scratched
start with Radius: 0 Threshold: 0
slowly pull the Radius to the right (increase) until ALL the spots and dings disapear. Then go to the Threshold and slowly increase it until the spots and dings start to reappear. then move it back a little.
You should have a blurred mess.
Now add an adjustment mask. With the black brush bring back all the detail...the eyes, nose, lips, the outline lines of the neck, hair, dress (use about 50% opacity on the dress to keep texture but smooth it out). The only thing soft should be the skin. If you want to really see what you've done on the mask, ALT+Click the small mask white window in the layer. It will bring up the mask veiw. Press again to go back to normal veiw. Merged visible
Then I opened the adjustment / level with the mid point eyedropper I sampled the dress..then brought in the Highlight white trangle to lighten the image, moved the midpoint a little also.
After that I just worked the picture to death...can't even say what I did because I tried everything on it..a lot of light low opacity brushes with skin tones...brush set to color for the dress. (she told me what color it had to be, Originally I left it just plain gray...lol oooppss.
Oh yeah cut her out of the backgound and simply made a Radial gradient for the background behind her head.
Hope this helps in your own projects.
Lasa