Hey!

I've been retouching a lot of photos recently, and I've come to the point where I've focused so much on the actual retouching that I've lost any inspiration I might have had as to what to do with the picture after the retouched foundation is there. I might just be burned out and out of any ideas from doing too many(several a day)

Any suggestions you guys have would be awesome!

Larger files here:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/216/509002769_32577a3a3c_b.jpg
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/225/509002509_304d6ab002_o.jpg

EDIT: By the way, I havn't done anything with color or contrast yet at all, The pictures had this hue when they were taken, and I had planned on keeping the hues etc., but now I'm thinking there might be something that works better? I think this is the first time I've posted pics of myself in the forum, lol.

Nice photos - Very well suited for conversion to B&W

You could bring back some of the color...I used a cool photo filter.... Then use any procedure you want to add effects.

Butch

You could bring back some of the color...I used a cool phoho filter.... Then use any procedure you want to add effects.

Butch

ooh, i really like the gist of what you did, reminds me for some reason of a streetcar named desire, LOL.

This is what I ended up doing with this shot, the other one i decided to probably leave red hued, with some minor adjustments on contrast etc

Thanx for the inspiration!!

Cooled it down, took a slightly different crop, radial blur on the background and enhanced the glow.

Stosh

First thing I did was copy the red channel into an adjustment layer and gave it the linear dodge blending mode which made the picture just pop right out of that reddish place. Then I just tweaked a little here and there and the same technique worked perfectly on both pictures :) Took me about 3 minutes with both pictures.. I thought for sure it would have taken me longer but the color information was already there.. it was just hiding!