Comments please - B&W babe

Hi y'all,

I'm looking for suggestions on improving B&W tonality, if you think it's necessary. My goal is to get something that has the tonal range of B&W film.

For this image (of my always-giggling Madelyn Joy) I tweaked the monochrome channel mixer in Photoshop, converted to grayscale, then converted to a warm gray duotone and hit auto-contrast before sharpening a bit.

To my eyes it looks acceptable, albeit a little overexposed in some spots. I know that it's hard to be objective when the subject is your own tot, so I seek your assistance...

Byte size: ZERO | Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE

I'n not experienced enough to give advice but as far as I'm concerned the photo is a Hallmark.

... or even an Anne Geddes!

Really, Mitch, it's another of your lovely baby pictures. Though my personal favourite is still that Dad & Baby one. I am a great fan of the macro mode and here is another example of a great use of it.

Thank you Colin and Maple! I appreciate your comments.

Maple, you've given me an idea - one that's so simple I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't think of it sooner: I will compare the tones in my B&W baby photographs to those produced by some pros (like Geddes) and adjust accordingly. Should be a fairly easy process with the PS channel mixer. I may not get it exact, but should get close enough for my use.

Cheers,

Other than the slight overexposure you've already mentioned, I think it's great Mitch. All the shades of gray that I can think of are in there.

Looks good to me!

Thank you Clio. Now I need to try your "spin the camera" effect on my kids. My wife will think I've gone crazy!

Mitch

My 2 cent's worth.

At first glance I felt and still feel that the whole image of
Madelyn Joy is rather too dark.

Lots of tones around middle gray and lower, but the
face in particular is rather dark and shadowy.
Only parts of the left cheek and left eyebrow get up to
perhaps Zone 6.

The background too is rather "muddy" to use an old
darkroom word.

I feel that increasing the brightness would help.

Kind regards

eland

Hello again Mitch

Assuming that our monitors have similar calibration,
have a look at your image of Madelyn Joy with these
adjustments.

Brightness +60
Contrast +10

Unsharp mask +175 with Pixel radius at 0.3

If you now fuzz out the surround of the image in
very pale gray, stronger at the border than in toward
the baby, then ............... Watch out Ms Geddes !

Regards

eland
(hal)

Thank you Hal for your observations!

I see now that the mid-grays are indeed overwhelming. I tried your settings but the highlights seemed a bit overblown on my monitor, so I ended up using curves in PS to make most of the adjustments. (I'm not one for the easy route anyway.) A night-and-day improvement over the original image, so thanks for this suggestion!

I'm not sure what you mean by this:

I tried it two ways: first by setting up a gradient mask in PS and applying a pale warm-gray diffusion filter; second by applying a soft-focus effect (gaussian blur on two separate layers, one in "lighten" mode the other in "darken" ) using the same gradient mask. The soft-focus effect is quite pleasant - is that what you meant by "fuzz out"? Or did you have something else in mind? I'm willing to experiment if there's a different and/or better technique.

Thanks again,


[***UPDATE: CLICK HERE TO SEE THE RETOUCHED IMAGE***]