you know how you look for a 'look' and go all around it and get near, then lose it again and go looking some more? well, i finally found the look i've been trying to get for months now. it's a high contrast, but softer texture and high saturation without losing color integrity.... or something like that
nancyj made a comment on this look i've been looking for a while back. it was about a very high contrast style i was doing and it was just never quite right. i knew it, she knew it and so i veered off again.
well anyways, this is very close to what i've been looking for for quite a while now

no filter forge filters... no 3rd party filters or plugins at all. this is all
psp.
i treat the image as a photo to begin with and clean it up a bit and treat it a bit and then do some blurs, blend modes and unsharp masks. and then i whack it with a warped tree, just for peter