Caite and Robin Post Processed - LOL!

I took this image of Caite with her cousin's little girl. The image is so-so. The lighting is not great. The background is too busy and too sharply focused. The framing is not top drawer either. How do you salvage the memory and make it into something more interesting. In the film days it would be set aside. Not so in the digital world of Photoshop.

This is a more artistic rendering of the girls. Extracting them from the distracting background, converting to B&W and reducing the saturation produces this image of the girls. Playing around on the layer beneath by adding brush strokes of small dots and them clipping a gradated color to the brush strokes produces the oh so gentle color I have achieved. 

I like the end result a lot more than the original. And your take please...