High contrast project

[djdazzler]

Hi everyone
I am a student studying photography. I have been set an assignment where I need to produce a series of images in a style of a photographer of my choice. Having seen his work in a gallery I have chosen the Valentina series by Alex Korolkovas. A number of the images in this series contain nudes, so I am limited with what I can post here as an example as I wish to respect the forum rules. I hope the below images are acceptable

I have taken a few trial photographs of a model friend using a blown white background, but after that I get stuck. I have tried several methods of achieving the result I'd like (e.g. posterize) but none of the results have the same quality that Korolkovas' images do. A friend suggested using channels but I don't really understand how. I have searched online for a tutorials, but I'm not entirely sure which terms to search for. I'd be incredibly grateful if someone could help me or point me in the right direction.

Alex Korolkovas images:

 

[Eggy]

Is this what you're after?
Using the 'camera raw' filter did get me this:



to



Before using the camera raw filter always turn your image into a smart object so alterations can be corrected since no image is the same.






and (but feel free to experiment with the other settings - it is trial and fail)

 

[djdazzler]

Is this what you're after?
Using the 'camera raw' filter did get me this:

to

Before using the camera raw filter always turn your image into a smart object so alterations can be corrected since no image is the same.

and (but feel free to experiment with the other settings - it is trial and fail)

Thank you. That has been a huge help. I use Lightroom rather than Camera Raw, and have been able to do something similar using that now. Seems like I was overthinking it, and believing it to me much more of a complicated process than it was.

 

[Rich54]

I tried a different approach (using the same image as Eggy):
1. Convert the image to black & white.
2. Use a Levels adjustment to create very strong contrast.
3. Copy the combined image to a new layer using Stamp-Visible (Shift+Ctrl+Alt+E). Change the layer blend mode to Divide.
4. Gradually apply a gaussian blur until an image starts to emerge. In this example I used a blur of 8 pixels.