Always Lock The Door

I know what you are thinking.... Cute Shoes!

To be honest, I was just finishing up with some work for a cap I'm making for Alectra.  I had an image that I was playing around with color options, and went back to the web, so I could save an original version.  Out of curiosity, I clicked through to see what website it came from, and found myself on a blog titled Sexuelle. Specifically a page from September 2010.  I didn't even scroll down that far when I found this image... and BOOM, I had a quick cap written in my head.  It wasn't new, it wasn't original, but it would certainly be fun for those that share my personal kings (and yes, that's why I used Jeremy/Jennifer... she shares my kinks!).

The only problem I had was the image itself.  It was fairly small.  Here is the original image:

Its only 653x481 pixels.  I generally prefer my images to start out at over 1000 pixels wide.  I can then shrink it down if needed, as that doesn't hurt the quality all that much.  But blowing up an image to almost twice its size... hmm...

If you blow up to the full size, you can see how much pixelation was added to make this 1000 pixels wide. It honestly is just unacceptable to me.  But this image just SANG to me, and I didn't want to even attempt to look for another one.  So I had two options.  Just use the smaller one, even though it wasn't the best of quality, or try out some filters in Photoshop and see if I could clean it up some.

I went with the second option, giving myself 20 minutes.  If I didn't have a satisfactory result in that time, I would revert to option 1, and just make a small cap.

It turns out I needed all of 2 minutes.  My first thought was to blur the image.  Just enough so that the pixelation wouldn't be quite noticeable.  Now normally I use the 'Gaussian' Blur option in Photoshop.  It gives a very nice 'out of focus' look.  Great for most of the time, but it isn't the effect I wanted here.  Out of the other options I tried the 'Surface' Blur.  I tired it on the default settings just to see what it would do, and.. well I'll let it speak for itself:

As you can see, its not perfect.  Around her head and hands, it still is a little pixelated.  But I knew the focus of most people would be on her panties, thighs and ass.  And that area looked damn good to me.  Once the image was clean, the rest went lickity split!