What would you do for this photo?

I went out last night. I snapped a few photos. I got this one which seemed to come out with quite a bit of detail. I was really impressed by the detail. I rarely get photos with this much detail and I really would like more of it (focus misses or it's just not sharp in general). But, what kind of editing would you do? This is basically straight out of the camera. Any suggestions on how to get photos with this much detail? (Hair, face, etc.) I can upload a higher resolution (the detail is pretty good at full resolution too).

Photo is just a semi-candid/portrait of an adult male.
http://img593.imagesha​ck.us/img593/3445/img0​080fl.jpg

The info is in the image, but it was shot with the 50mm at F/4, 1/200th second, ISO 400, with a flash firing (ETTL mode and bouncing off a wall/ceiling). I might have had exposure compensation 1 stop down. I can't recall and don't know if I can get that out of the EXIF data.

Have you thought about B&W? I just did a quick edit, hope you don't mind.

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I agree I'd go B&W on this one. There's not a lot of color there to do a great edit with, but my other option would be to do some work with curves and levels

Damian75 wrote in post #15490016
Have you thought about B&W? I just did a quick edit, hope you don't mind.

I'm curious as how you got it to look like that. A simple B&W conversion in lightroom doesn't seem to produce a similar result.

I've seen similar photos where the details seem even more 'sharp' in B&W. I don't know what people are doing to get that...

TridenTBoy wrote in post #15490450
I'm curious as how you got it to look like that. A simple B&W conversion in lightroom doesn't seem to produce a similar result.

I've seen similar photos where the details seem even more 'sharp' in B&W. I don't know what people are doing to get that...

Not really sure what options you have in lightroom as I don't use it. The one I posted was done in photoshop with the channel mixer, curves a little dodging and burning and the unsharp mask filter.

Damian75 wrote in post #15490016
Have you thought about B&W? I just did a quick edit, hope you don't mind.

Hey Damian75, how would I post my uploaded edit within my post like you did? i uploaded it to my my site and put the URL in the image brackets, but it showed up blank... so i just pasted the URL underneath it.

EDIT: Nevermind... I mistyped the address.

I took a quick shot at a color one to.

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

Wow, its 100 times better as a BW

Very nice Damian! - Can you create an action for this ? :$ - pretty please?

I think that it's a cracking shot but as everyone said, black & white.

Damian's B&W is excellent. Shunsai's color rendition is also excellent. I don't care for the skin in Damian's color rendition, too sharp and looks unnatural.

Damian's B&W version is definitely the best.

TridenTBoy wrote in post #15489904
Any suggestions on how to get photos with this much detail? (Hair, face, etc.) I can upload a higher resolution (the detail is pretty good at full resolution too).

what 50mm are you using? stepping it down to F4 might be the reason you got so much detail.

Also most lenses have sweet spots in the focusing range, some are better at MFD than at infinity or in between.

Moin wrote in post #15493370
Very nice Damian! - Can you create an action for this ? :$ - pretty please?

Thanks. As for an action I don't really use them for anything other than batch resizing. I keep a recipe book of things I like, a bit of a leftover from my darkroom days. I know plenty of people who use actions and produce great images, if I was shooting weddings or something with high volume I might do more of it. I do mostly portrait work and treat it more like fine art type work with culling down to a small number of images per session and then work on each as it's own.