What processing?

SimpsonBrothers

I love this shot and was wondering if you could guess what processing was done to it?

dlplumer

I love it too, and am also curious. It has that renaissance look which I have been looking for for some time now.

pathfinder

Not sure I know either, but I see a bit of warmth, soft light, a bit of grunge or noise, and decreased contrast or shadow/highlight alteration.

Start with a large light source or a window, warm the highlights a touch, some noise, deal with the contrast ratio with Topaz adjust, shadow/highlight or something.

Mnemosyne

2 things I see.

1. It looks like two light sources. One above, and one fill. Unless I'm reading the shadows under the nose and on the wall incorrectly.

2. And then there is a weird effect going on in the hair, almost as if there is no detail left, like it's been blurred or sharpened out of existence, or something.

adbsgicom

Caveat: I've never even tried something like this, but just had some fun with Topaz Adjust 4 and Portraiture
Took this photo (horrible starting place), clearly the lighting and starting place was much better, but I think part of the key is the warming filter overkill and using Topaz to push the highlights' contrast to the rest of the image:


Ran Adjust4 Spicify with brightness down, a bit of hue adjust and dinked around with the auto exposure levels a bit, saved and ended up rerunning it again and got really textured effect. THen ran portraiture on that into a new level at really high smoothing (everything maxed out). Ran same portaiture on the original for getting the hair very smooth as well. Put in a warming filter cranked to 80% then 10% soft light on top.

So layers:
1. base
2. 2x Spicify normal 55%
3. 1x portraiture on spicify layer 50%
4. 1x portraiture on base using a mask. Hair 100%, face 40%
5. Warming Filter (85) at 77%
6. Copy of base at 10% softlight
Did a bit of screening on the eyes on the 3rd layer.
Ended up with


Edit: Looking a second time, I didn't get the final highlights right, but playing w/ the softlight layer and pushing more of the topaz layers in brings that up some.
Also 'de-hobbited' the arms...


Perhaps that helps someone more skilled with Topaz than I to see where to take this.

Zerodog

She now has hobbit arms!

adbsgicom

Yeah, probably needed to mask off some of the grit there. The whole image isn't worth anything with that processing, so I'm not too tempted to go back through. It was more of an exercise in getting somewhere in the neighborhood of the original's processing.