B&W portrait from a 50% unusable photo

[tokyorush]

I was a second/first guy on a friends wedding and did pretty well, nobody expected results that good, but still there is room for improvement. Always is. Anyhow, one of the photos was pretty bad, underexposed, awkward angle, the exposure was fixable in LR but even with exposure right, colors were bad and looked like from a point&shoot that somebody's aunt took. No matter what I tried, colors didn't return to 100% good, so I tried to go B&W, clicked the LR preset for High Contrast (not sure if this is the name) and the magic unfolded in front of my eyes.

Additional fixes were a touch of cropping, cloned out a light bulb left high, some NoiseNinja (original shot at ISO400), used the matchstick tool to locally increase exposure around the eyes so that the details show up (eyes were originally one deep-black area, had to work on it so that the details of the pupil show up) and voila. Turned out to be my favorite shot of the wedding. Dunno what yo think about it or if somebody could've saved the photo (I am not a jedi knight when it comes to PhotoShop, more of an advanced padawan), but I don't care anymore, I like it the way it is now!

[Hayward Taylor]

uh - software technology and a lot of determination and look at the result ... not knowing what the original looks like, I say you an excellent job .. mabe you should do a "before" and "after" comparison .. very nice .. and by the way - my aunt takes some very nice photos with here p&s

[tokyorush]

Thanks for the input, Hayward, I'll see if I can reset the settings on the original and upload a "before" version too...might be interesting...

[sheldonc]

Not that I understand all the steps you went though but It's a really nice image now