For my personal portrait, I used this lovely picture I found on pixabay of a girl and her fluffy friend set in front of the ocean in what I'm assuming is a fairly cold place. I did a bit of stuff with this picture, so prepare for a nice chunk of text!

To start with, I duped the image and applied the sharpening macro from the textbook to see how it looked and dropped it down to 40% opacity to add a little edge to the overall image. I then combined the image and applied a soft unsharp mask to bring up a little more of the detail. I also used a curves adjustment to pull down the exposure just a little bit and yield a more candid-style photo when combined with the sharpening. After that, I combined and duped the image again and applied a medium gaussian blur with a mask on it to blur the background some and focus attention on the subject. Then, I combined the image again and converted it into a smart object so that I could utilize some smart filters for the final touch-up process. I went with a liquify first in order to pull her smile up and hairline down just a touch, and then I added a smart gaussian blur of 0.7 to pull down a touch of the sharpness that had built up between the layers. Lastly, I added a light orange color fill layer (set to color burn) to provide a subtle color grade to the whole image and round out the candid-ish style that I was going for!

For my initial image, I used this shot from pixabay: https://pixabay.com/en/dog-laika-animals-pets-arctic-774722/