Its been awhile since I've posted anything. I picked up CS3 since Adobe has a deal going and I've been doing a little playing around.

The before....

Timmy and Tadhg - before.jpg (129.67 KiB) Viewed 1011 times

And the after....

Timmy and Tadhg - after.jpg (75.01 KiB) Viewed 1011 times

Not exactly sure how I got to the end result as the history was a mile long (I was REALLY playing!), but I think I managed to get something out of that image.

That looks realy great, now you can tell us how you did it.

OK....here's what I think I did........

1. Converted original image to B&W. Pretty much left the conversion "as is" because it looked OK to me.
2. Did a rough selection with the magnetic lasso tool. It picked up the edges pretty well, but at that point I wasn't aiming for perfect either. Just wanted to see how it would do. Feather was set to 10 pixels and contrast to 10%. That's what it was set to when I opened it, so I left it that way. I was just playing......
3. Lasso has a refine edge button, so I hit that and shrunk the selection a little bit.
4. Copied the selection to its own layer.
5. Did Layer -> New Fill Layer -> Solid color, used nearly black as the fill color.
6. Drug the fill layer underneath the original layer.
7. Then burned the fill layer, set to highlights and 50% until I ended up with what you see here.

That looks really great, Gene.

Thanks......its still a bit rough. I may go back and clean it up a little bit.

Gene, I didn't see your thread this morning but saw Don's about it. Again, precious.

Thanks for sharing how you did it.

That's precious. I like what you did to it, too.

Thanks, all of you.