Street...where would you be without the candidness of people. Like animals in their own habitat they do the silliest of things. This shot isn't silly...just think of the concept of a photographer taking a photograph of a person taking a photograph...sounds like some sort of perversion.
Anyway - the processing. I dropped this shot by 1 full exposure in Lightroom and then applied a preset called WOW-d_BnW_02...it's the most contrasty of the 10 WOW B&W presets. Then export to CS3. I applied a macro I developed to give the image some contreast. It involves creating a mask from a 50% gray layer and the background copy of the layer, then applying this as a mask to a curves adjustment (S-curve). I removed a couple of bits of white and then ran the white dropper from a curves layer onto the ladies scarf...this brought it up nicely.
I got the lasso tool and loosely marked around the edge of the image (press Alt when you're doing this and you can go off the side of the image too). I applied a 250px feather (that's why you go outside the edge of the image). Ctrl-J and you have a new layer made from the selection. Change the layer property to multiply and you have a selective vignette. Duplicate it if you like to increase the strength and play with the opacity (I used 2 layers with the second on 70% opacity).
But I had too much noise...the ladies face was splotchy. As always when I'm converting images to B&W I tend to get noise...not to worry. I ran the Octave sharpening routine (as previous blog entry) and removed the 500%/1 radius/50% layer and flattened the image. I then ran a noiseware removal piece of software to clear the image on a duplicated layer. They say you should do this before sharpening...it depends on the image. I would normally check for areas where definition was lost after noiseware removal but this was fine.
You can see the before/after on my site.
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