Thanks for all the nice comments. Sorry I'm late responding, but I've been busy trying to get some other work processed and printed. Shel asked what was done in converting and retouching the original. As I said, I had the help of a professional retoucher, whose time is normally billed at $300/hour. We started by doing a straight grayscale conversion. She says she has experimented extensively with all of the recipes and considers them mainly bullshit. After the conversion, we created an adjutment layer and cranked away on the levels to achieve the tonality and contrast we wanted. Every little adustment was a new layer. I believe there are 14 in all on the final PSD. We masked the man and made a halo around his headin the background, then flipped the right side of the background over to the left to make it symmetrical. The eyes on the original included reflections of the street. Interesting, but bizarre. So we painted new eyeballs. We also painted his facial wrinkles to make t! hem more prominent. We added a vignette, then brought down the most extreme highlights with the shadow/highlight tool and the burn tool. And that's about it. The PSD file is about 380 megs. The tiff is 60 megs. I printed it for my portfolio last night. Digital BW is a good thing. Paul
> Hi! > > > Some of you may recall a portrait I posted last year. It's a shot of an > > older fellow who shines shoes outside a clothing store in Birmingham, > > Michigan. I've revisited it as a high contrast BW with some background > > cleanup and other mods, including removing reflections from the eyes. I > > had some help from a professional retoucher who has been working with me > > on another project. The new version is here: > > http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=3451662 > > > > The original is here: > > http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=2512646 > > Game, set, and match!!! > > You win, Paul, you surely do... > > But then again you had some pro help... <wink> > > Boris >
