Julia more finished

Even after my recent revelation concerning values and saturation, and even after several times boosting the brightness and carefully modulating saturation on this, it was still pretty dingy looking. Its tough to tell when you've got it right - so easy to fool yourself one way or the other. It still doesn't look completely finished to me - could probably use some skin texture and a few freckles on the face - maybe I'll try for that later. And maybe the eyes are still a bit small, but I like the way to looks and I feel like if I mess with it more I'm just gonna screw it up. It seems like there's only so far you can advance on one piece and then it's time to call it finished and move on. One thing I found is that if I boost the highlights too much with the Levels adjustment I lose all the fine shading in the halftones. I did that and then noticed it when comparing with the earlier version, which looks murkier but much more nicely modulated in the lights. So I backtracked and re-did the Levels, this time not boosting highlights at all, just mid tones and punching up the darks slightly.

I also used a little trick in the background. Where there's a patch of light on the wall I added some lighter and higher saturation versions of the colors - the red and green. I went into the color picker and slid the cursor up and to the right, toward the brighter and more fully saturated version of each color. It could also work to adjust it toward the next higher color along the spectrum too - a spectral shift. Worth a try anyway. I need to try to find the diagram I saw recently that made me want to try this and post it here to stick it into my memory.