Day 2 - Portrait of a Sweet Girl

This is shaping up to be much more fun than I initially thought. I've never really enjoyed processing B&W before, but now I do! For this shot I started out from the Full Dynamic Smooth setting in the Nic Collection and tweaked it from there. I love how flexible things are with all those sliders, it's simply wonderful and it makes processing so much easier!

When I had gotten the contrasts the way I wanted them I added a slight burn effect along the edges and a discrete lens fallout. That gave me the B&W effect I wanted, but I ended up with some unwanted grain. After a bit of blurring and noise fixing I was back on track. Finally, I enhanced the eyes a bit. Not terribly much though, this sweet girl has amazing eyes, but a little dodging and burning brought them out even more (dodge the whites and reflections and burn around the outer edges of the iris using a soft brush). Done!

I may be bias, because I love this girl, but I think it ended up just beautiful, don't you?

/MrsHjort