There's nothing about this subject related to being a pirate of any kind. I just thought there was something of a pirate look to the image and that's how I've come to think of it. And so, it's "The Pirate."

This is a tabblo story of what happens when an old time darkroom B&W print maker gets to play around with a digital image editor - without the comparable level of experience but with the same goal of a striking image.

I had this picture that I'd taken that had interesting qualities but on the whole there were flaws that needed to be corrected. The original picture was in color in a room with bright red walls. The red put a color cast into the image that could be corrected but even so, I thought the color was distracting.

Make it B&W.

But when the simple "desaturate" feature was used the resulting B&W image lost more than color saturation. It lost all vibrancy. All life.

A B&W conversion couldn't be that bad.

Though the blue channel looked pretty good (note that these show signs of manipulation - the vignetting - the originals are gone) it could still use some enhancing.  Looking at each color component I saw that I could grab parts from the other channels, where detail was lost or tones were better, and make a better overall image. That's what I did.

Using the selection tool I took the best of each component image, enhanced those parts and then merged them into the new "better" composite. That's the beauty of digital "layers." Pieces of a picture, layered on top of each other, with only the best showing through. Use the different image tools to remove the weaknesses in each of the parts and enhance the strengths. The primary tools I used were levels and curves which fine tune the contrast and tones.

But looking at the adjusted image I was still not happy with the pose. There was a bit of a slouch. Also the face seemed exaggeratedly broad. Since I knew I could grab pieces of the image I grabbed the face and moved it up - to counter the slouch. Not that difficult. The double Adam's apple wasn't even a problem since that's not unusual. I feathered, blurred and blended the image layers where ever the move looked apparent.

I noticed that the selection tool could be used to change the shape of a selection. Why not experiment with that feature? I selected the face again and using the "transform" feature I squeezed it to make it more narrow. Again, layer blending and blurring handled any edge effects. I also did the old "hand waving" method of darkening the sides of the face to give a more narrow look. Sorry but I never saved these intermediate stages. No images to show the changes other than the composite.

But enhancing can take different directions. Instead of removing the broadness of the face, why not use its implied strength and add toughness rather than tone it down? I was playing with the digital tools at this point so I can't say exactly what I did to create this version - The Coal Miner - mainly it was image sharpening on the skin areas of the face - to an extreme degree.

Here's a combined look at the original image and two B&W

directions.

Note: The top image has a further narrowing giving an almost gaunt look, with only the shoulders left broad.