Monochrome Portrait Porcessing

[Tom Mann]

I know this is totally out of "left field", but when one is confronted with an image that is this soft, I have found that instead of trying to sharpen it, a better approach often is to turn it into a graphic form with hard edges between different areas / colors.

Anything (eg, introducing intentional posterization, false colors, etc.) that distracts the viewer from the problems should be considered, eg, ...

 

[chrisdesign]

I had a few minutes this morning to play with your latest image. Probably the most noticeably different tweaks that I did were:

a) sharpen up the image a bit more ... much more than this and there would be too many artifacts;

b) burn and dodge to try to move shadows and highlights around to make the light sources look like they were a bit higher and less diffuse;

c) paint in selective increases in contrast in some areas;

d) quickly try to reconstruct some detail in the blown highlights;

e) darken the background and introduce a gradient to make the subject stand out more (aka, "spotlight" him).

BTW, FWIW, my very first step was to tweak the color version in ACR to get it looking as nice as possible in color before converting to B&W and continuing on with further tweaking of the image.

T

PS - Since we had already discussed the reflections in the glasses and I didn't want to spend too much time on this, I hardly paid any attention to fiddly things like the reflections, masking, etc.

PPS - In retrospect, since the original was so blurry, I probably should have spent the time to introduce some fake skin texture because the left side of his face (viewer's right) is too smooth for my taste.

Tom, your B+W image looks like a painting now.
Maybe this was intentional, though for my taste it is overdone and just looks unnatural.

 

[Tom Mann]

You're absolutely right, Chris. When I'm confronted by a blurry, low contrast original, if there are no external constraints on what I do with the image, I often will try to hide the problems with immediately noticeable effects that distract the viewers' eyes. Although I mentioned this in regard to the color version I produced (because it was most obvious there), as you observed, I also used a bit of this approach on my earlier B&W version.

T

 

[Bobbysocks]

Hi All,
Im not sure if this is the right place to ask this question but its as good a place as any.

Can anyone tell me how to do this kind of thing or even what this technique is called??

see below colour pic turned into a black and white illustration style image



if this is the wrong place to ask this kind of thing, suggestions of where else to ask are more than welcome.

Cheers

Bob