Exercise 3 - Applying a Process

My daughter Leah came home from the hospital on 8/14, and what better moment/subject for a portrait? This photo is her lying on the bed sound asleep and it's something I want to remember forever, so I'm motivated to make sometime worth hanging on the wall. There were several similar images, but I picked this out out because the focus was right on her eyes, it is well-framed, and the DOF seems just right (at larger apertures her hand is out of focus). Actually, the JPEG from my camera looks great already, but I want to see if I can make something stunning.

Photo data:
--Olympus PEN E-PL1 w/Panasonic 200mm pancake lens
--F/2.8, 1/15.0 sec, ISO 1600, auto WB, no flash
--Light from window behind camera with southern exposure, mid afternoon sun

Initial image from as JPEG

Just glancing at this I have a few concerns that I'll want to see if I can fix in processing
--It's a bit grainy from the ISO
--The shadows on the left side make this look like pin-hole photo
--Very little color


The Process (i.e. my plan)
(1)  Crop and correct orientation
(2)  Exposure
(3)  White balance
(4)  Input/Capture sharpen
(5)  Denoise
(6)  Vibrance and saturation
(7)  Switch to RGB
(8)  Dodge and burn
(9)  Fix distortion
(10) Output sharpen
(11) Output as JPEG

Well, not all of these applied - the crop was pretty good, I didn't input sharpen, and dodging and burning in Gimp is non-trivial for an otherwise good picture. Still, I followed this pretty closely and here's what came out:

A keeper