Classic portrait Mike. If you shoot raw files you can often do a fair amount of highlight and shadow recovery; sometimes worth a try.
25 Feb 2007 4:03pm
@Dan: The original photo was not as awful as I may have made it sound. You can see it <here>. Her face came out a bit overexposed, but nothing unfixable. The whole image, however, is just "blah". Since there was so little contrast between her coat and the background, I decided to just clip the histogram on the black side and blend them together, leaving the metal clasps to fill out what I thought was the natural "line" of the shot, which was a sort of kite-shaped diamond consisting of her face, the collar on each side, and the clasps. There was so little color left that a 2 or 3 posterization really brought out the turn of her neck, while having practically no effect anywhere else on the picture.
I noticed the posterization and thought it might have been a result of running out of highlight detail, which was why I mentioned it. You're absolutely right about the 'line', and I really like what you've done with the shot.