Several people asked how I did my Black on Black entry.
Now that the challenge is over, I'll give a quick description...
I was experimenting with some harsh lighting following the self-portrait challenge. The original is not a shot I would normally keep, let alone enter a challenge or contest.
With the relaxed editing rules, I took a poor image and went to work in Photoshop.
Here is the original:
I converted the image to grayscale and then adjusted levels and contrast.
I then cropped to just my face...
I copied the entire image into another layer and flipped horizontally. I had too much detail and light on my cheek, so I used the airbrush with black and painted over my cheek area to darken it up.
The background was not pure black, so I selected the entire background and painted it true black.,
I then clones out some spots, imperfections, and some distracting parts of my eyebrows and eyelashes.
Having made quite a few corrections, I deleted the copied layer so I wouldn't have to make the same corrections twice.
I copied the layer and flipped horizontally again. I moved the mirror image to its current position.
I cropped again to the current composition, then I slected all and stroked with white to create the thin border. I then set black as the background color and increased the canvas size to give some space around the faces.
I then resized and ran the unsharp mask filter.
Here is what I came up with, utilizing a very unflattering and poor quality self portrait!
Thanks for the great score and third place finish!
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