Fix-it Friday #59 at i heart faces

This Fix-it Friday photo was submitted by Julie Rivera Photography, an IHF contributor. Here is her before:


And here is my edit:


As soon as I saw the image, I knew I wanted to go black and white with a really soft focus. (I think colored stripes in general are very distracting for photos.)

My workflow, using Photoshop CS4:
~cropped to focus on baby's face
~levels adjustment layer to lighten midtones
~reduce noise
~unsharp mask 100, 1, 10
~convert to black and white
~duplicate, gaussian blur set to 4, then selectively masked to increase softness
~a little tweaking of contrast to add pop

Thanks for looking!