Building an Image – Monochrome conversion

This is an image of Mike that I processed last month for Impact Group. The first shot is the un-manipulated RAW file from which I decided to make a monochrome image.

I wanted to make a strong monochrome image from it. For the first stage, I tone-mapped in Lightroom using the Lightroom develop module, then vignette, and local adjustments with the adjustment brush. I then imported into Photoshop, applied a transform to reduce the convergence and then slightly enlarged his eyes using the Liquefy tool and lightened the eyes on a mask.

I think it’s looking more “powerful” but the beard is brighter than the face, so further burning and dodging was done on a layer.

The last processes were to convert to monochrome using the B&W filter

Final adjustments are always very subtle and for this image I added a final adjustment with levels then unsharp mask 250% at 0.3 radius.