So my daughter asked me to try & fix this pic and here's what I came up with so far.

This one gave me fits with his skin tone/shadowed eye sockets, mixed lighting that came from from a semi-stormy/semi overcast/semi-clear late afternoon sky ... as a fast moving cold front was moving in. It started raining probably 30 seconds after the shot. Brrr, it was a cold rain too as everyone dashed for cover.

Reworks welcome.

A beautiful young lady.
She could make even the worst PP look good, ha.

Not that the PP is bad mind you.
I'm just saying.

Very nice image.

Thanks ... it was a "Hey Dad" ... let's go do this as we ran from the car to try & beat the rain. I don't remember why, but it looks like I blew it out a bit.

I tried to get a good correction on it ... but I'm missing something along the way ... so some creative diversion is where I'm at right now.

BTW ... this is working from the small jpg ... I can't find the RAW for some reason.

Oh yeah, I missed the focus on it too (that post is sharp though ) ... just to add insult to injury. At least I can use the excuse that we were in a hurry, low light and manual focus with a slow lens (c/y 35-70/3.4). My glasses were so fogged up from the humidity and running, I'm surprised I could even see to get a decent composition, let alone good focus. Definitely a "murphy" shot.

I like the old fashioned look of the sepia toned background but find the skintones biased too much towards yellow. I played with it a bit and came up with this with more neutral skin with the dark unflattering shadows cloned lighter and blown skin cloned in darker. I put some life in his eyes by copy and pasting her irises, painted on some butterfly lighting and got rid of the gnarly dark shadow under his nose.

Hope you can find the raw! So much more you can do with the raw.

Convert it to black and white.

Bruce Sawle wrote:
Convert it to black and white.

Then colorize it giving the same look and feel of a oil painted B&W high school photo from the 60's.

Rusty certain images suffer from a variety of afflictions. The composition on this one is problematic. Although I understand the staircase attraction I can easily say that more should have been captured on the left placing the bush (on the right side) off the image. Or maybe a different crop.

Although I like the corrections for light done to the first image, that effect applied is for the lack of a better word tacky. I would similarly say the same if you were to color this image. Just sayin...

Here i converted it to B&W and added contrast

Chuck, I appreciate the direction you moved the comp off center (similar to Kaden's suggestion), although I prefer a bit more negative space above the his head, but the crop was specified @ 8x10 and with a specific starting point. Thanks for the input all. We looked at going B&W if need be, but wound up printing the color version just to see how it would look. The printed version turned out nicer than the monitor is showing, particularly in her frame of choice. Her mom & sister "gushed" over it ... I didn't bother telling the other two how much was still "wrong" with it.

Old man wisdom:
If one woman likes it, it's "good". If three women in the same house like it, it's "perfect" ... even if it's "wrong".
Somedays, I get to be "perfect" ... but not too often.

BTW, Kaden ... no worries @ "tacky" ... half the time that's just a synonym for "prom".