i feel bad...

...just because I haven't done "One Photo a Week" in forever. Please forgive me, okay?

Anyway, I'm going to try to start doing this every Monday or Tuesday or so, because then I won't tell myself on Monday that I'll do it on Tuesday then I'll have a schedule to stick to.

Okay. So this week's (overdue) photo is...

 ...of Molly.

I know, it's kinda lame, but you can't resist that sweetness in her face, right? Yes, I know, the photo quality is still kinda poor -- so here's what I'm going to do to spruce it up...

{click on any photo to enlarge}

 Okay, so here we are with our base image in GIMP (also termed as the "Free Photoshop").

 I went to "Colors" and clicked on the brightness/contrast tool.

 I bumped up the contrast quite a bit and then increased the brightness of the photo very slightly. You don't want to have to bright (or dark, either) a photo.

 Looking better already, right? :)

 Now, there's only one two things I need to add to the photo: an attractive but faded watermark to copyright my photo (just in case ;)), and a fancy focus on just Molly's head. So I went to the toolbox and got out my blur/sharpen tool. (Yes, I know "something" is spelled wrong. It was a typo, okay? ;))

 These were the settings I used for the brush, which I used to blur my photo. :]

Then I went around with a brush and blurred everything around Molly's head, which resulted in...this!

I'm quite proud of it, even though it was a pretty basic edit to start with. ;)

And now, just for fun, here's a before-and-after flashback.

 before

after

Hope y'all have a nice Monday!