My girls went to a "Great Gatsby" party and had this photo taken on a mobile and posted to facebook. I have tried to enhance it but keep getting a dark stripe on the left of Vanessa's face.

They really look the 'part' and I would love to print a photo out of this. Can anyone do anything to better it?

You need to hang out with better photographers.

lol saulgoode. I just had another look. I think the marking is probably from something around their faces. It is actually on both girls.

I duplicated the layer and put the top layer into multiply mode. This seems to have brought out a little detail.

Thank you Erisian

Sally, I can try a better result then more time. Just woke up, and could not resist giving it a try.
Maybe this topic you can be helpful - viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2922
My attempt.

Both above were edited.
In the left picture kept skin tone, and tried to attenuate the stripe on the face.
On the right, I added a tan.

sallyanne: whew, this really is a tough one!! i've made some different attempts and i'm not really happy with any of them, but at least i have some that (to me at least) look good enough to post. i had to get very creative with the original, though, so maybe i've destroyed what you liked about it?
to begin with, i thought the light in the right side was distracting and i thought the girls would look better if they were more in focus. also, i thought an old fashioned looking vignette might go well with the gatsby look. so i made a dark vignette and cropped the picture a bit. after that i tried to paint away some of the dark shadows in the girls' faces and i hope i didn't make them look all plastic and weird now! i tried to enhance the contrasts in some places and tone it down in others and i did the same with the darkness and light. in the end i thought the colour versions all looked bad no matter how i manipulated the colours, so i desaturated and put a sepia tone on - that too went well with the gatsby theme, at least in my mind.

They look great AnMal. Sepia works well with these.

Wow you did a great job Anmal. I love them all. I was more interested in just the girls in the pictures so cropping them didn't bother me at all. Thanks a lot.

Thank you for your quick try too Akros. I would be interested to see what you can do given more time.

I have spent the last hour or two on it but no luck here.

sallyanne: glad you liked them! it really is a difficult original to work with, good luck with the editing!

Close K1TesseraEna. They are two of three. Always get called twins as the other is a boy.

I took a stab at it. I'm not sure if i did any good. but here it is.my copy is on the left. the original on the right.

Thank you rdgracer. It is a hard one. You did well to get the details to show but I don't think they are that colour even if they put tanning stuff on their skin. I didn't see them this night but I would guess they would have worn light make up on their faces too.

Here's my try. I tried to balance the colors and recover some of the details that washed out on the ladies faces. Sharpened a little bit, color balanced and adjusted contrast and overall brightness. Hope that helps.

Not bad ek22. Thank you

Thanks Akros.

that is funny Saul... I like that humour of yours.

You are welcome sally
I tried again.
By opening the file the following message appears:

Not sure if this somehow compromises image editing.
Thy girls have a spontaneous smile! It is pleasurable to edit an image contagious like that!

Though I can not get a satisfactory result, it is always good to have a challenge like that. For always trying to learn, and seeing the results of the other members.
In any case it is worth remembering "You need to hang out with better photographers"
Thx!

I like when my friends send me pics that are in the total loss category and I make things reappear that were seemingly lost forever. *pets the gimp*
Makes me look all magical. I don't dissuade the notion.