For anyone else like me who’s too young/ignorant to know about Lena: The Playboy Centerfold That Helped Create the JPEG.
@patdavid rumor has it that some co workers gave me that exact issue of the playboy as an anniversary present. 
Here is my attempt at editing Mairi:
Rather simple I guess. All done in darktable.
Reuploaded the image with some dithering to hide the posterization
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WOW some outstanding results
I will have a ‘go’ tonight when I am home from work.
BTW : Under the license agreement am I allowed to show my results on another forum. I would love to share my results on my photo blog page (with of course with credits / links back to here and Pat as author)
[quote=“Phil_Howcroft, post:23, topic:967”]
BTW : Under the license agreement am I allowed to show my results on another forum. I would love to share my results on my photo blog page (with of course with credits / links back to here and Pat as author)
[/quote]As long as it’s not commercial I don’t see any issue with that: Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
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Jonas, definitely not commercial , just another photo sharing site (more a blog) to compliment my flickr stream !
Cheers
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With the “classical” feel I find into this image, Mairi could also become the next Mona Lisa.
Done in Rawtherapee:
The pp3: http://filebin.net/9ob1r7uqzh
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Sguyader How did you get those ultra smooth skin tones ?
Cracking mono shot
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This is my interpretation
Rawtherapee
I found quite a bit of noise in the hair behind Mairi’s right ear, so I had to bump up the nose reduction sliders.
I always like the tone mapping as it can bring out some nice textures and tones
I always look for film emulation as they are so very creative.
Anyway here we go “Fuji FP-3000b --” film emulation and a little vignette.
Mairi_Troisieme_bw5.jpg.out.pp3 (5.9 KB)
Interesting how many of us have gone with a similar crop
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Please don’t do that, her nose is fine. 
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I used Contrast By Detail Levels for skin smoothing set before Black and White (as default), then turned on Black and White, and some light color toning. Details are in the pp3 attached to my previous post. My screen’s brightness was too high, now I see that my image was rendered a bit too dark.
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Oh yes good spot houz 
One more.
Here’s another version similar to my last, but with use of Darktable’s equalizer module on the skin.
Mairi_Troisieme.ORF.xmp (61.0 KB)
I wanted to see if I could do something similar in Darktable to the wavelet decompose method you show in GIMP, @patdavid, and with some simple masking I think it’s working out. It’s not done to anywhere near the same level of finesse as yours, but I’m pretty stoked that I’ve managed to get an effect that’s starting to move towards the look without having to leave Darktable. Further experimentation required!
The relevant modules are pictured below in case it’s useful to anyone. ‘equalizer 2’ is applied to most of the face, barring the eyes and eyebrows, nose outline and mouth. ‘equalizer 3’ is a stronger instance applied to just a couple of areas. Both of them actually increase luma contrast/detail a little for the finest couple of wavelet-based levels of detail.
I imagine this tool will also be extremely useful in other types of photography, such as landscape. Thanks so much for sharing information on this method! I’m looking forward to playing with it more on some of my photos.
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Hmm, even if you were going for the low-key look, I think you ought to have exposed-to-the-right…there was a lot of noise to fight as a result.
I didn’t go for low-key, instead just a normal portrait, with a warmer look.
Filmulated with adjusted WB, then NR, sharpening, and cropping in RT.
Edit: on my phone it looks rather too red now. I’ll fix a version with slightly more green later.
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Wow, l like your version, something close to what I was trying, but never achieved with the skin tones. Looking at my version I ended up with a rather tealish colour cast.
All part of the fun. 
Where’s the fun in providing a well crafted raw file? You didn’t have fun with it?
Awesome! It’s funny - independently at the 2014 Libre Graphics Meeting in Leipzig, Johannes Hanika from darktable presented a presentation on using wavelets for image processing:
That coincidentally was the same thing I was holding a workshop on for skin retouching.
(Where I had the gall to use a photo of my wife live at the workshop - wavelets can be… unflattering sometimes during the workflow):
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Are we going to have another PlayRaw thread?
I really enjoyed this one , it was good to share techniques and see other peoples interpretation
Regards
Phil
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