This is Chace, my muse and friend, attached is a raw file for you to fiddle with, and a jpg of what I came up with.
Processed in Gimp 2.10, imported with NUFraw (as darktable screws up the exposure)
There is some further tweaking as follows:
Gaussian Blur applied to backdrop
G’Mic Relief Light to create a new layer
Layer set to Overlay, 72%
Under members advice i am granting site users license under Creative Commons “BY-NC-SA” and we will see how that works out
To add a bit: the CC license help protect the forum and its members from any ill intent (not implying that you have any bad intentions, but this is the internet and we need to think “worst case”). We don’t have money for copyright infringements and lawyers, nor do we even want to get involved in such things.
This image is magnificent though! I hope you change your mind.
Thank you, we were really happy with it at the time, I see a bit of room for improvement now.
Yeah, most people do not approach life with ill intent, it’s just those fringe elements who want to see the world burn.
I have added the CC license, and will see what transpires
Oh man, thank you for this! I was just remarking in IRC when you posted it how much I liked this shot and hoped we’d be able to try things out with it.
I love the results of using relief light to enhance the muscles and texture. I normally paint those in by hand, but I’ll try that out myself.
This is a 10 minute hack job hahaha, the original ones I did I took a lot more time with, using a combination of techniques including some hand dodge and burn.
I really need to reshoot this with her, to try and get more out of it before post process, but we’ll see
Tried to keep the brightness range appropriate to the lighting environment, and gave the b&w look something more filmish (with an appropriate color filter on the lens).
A bit of fiddling in RawTherapee.
A little more fiddling in GIMP.
A bit of curves. An insane application of GEGL C2G (set it and walked away for a while…).
Cleaning background, expanding canvas to fit crop, some dodge & burn.