How to achieve... depth(?) look on this photo?

[kamepi_chan]

Hey guys :3 I've been really curious about this certain effect and I wanted to try it out if I can do it and... I'm close but I'm missing that 'oomph'.The effect that I want to achieve is this black and white photo. It's originally from a korean website called NATE. And they switch to different pictures based on news each day. Anyway, I found the same photo and tried to do it on my own. I refine masked it and all these other stuff but something is clearly missing. The photo above has... depth(?), I guess you can say, and I was wondering what effect should I use to get that look? Here is what I have right now. And you can see that the hair is lighter and more define in the photo above than on mine. What else should I do?Hope you guys can help me! Thanks~!

 

[Dataflow]

something like this?

what i did was run "Shadow/Highlights" on just the hair.
shadow option on 100% (play with the other shadow options until you get what you want)
and Highlights at 0%
then a run a "Reduce Noise" filter on it with
strength on full
Preserve detail on 0
Reduce color Noise on 0
Sharpen Detail at about 80%
thats just to soften the result of the "Shadow/Highlight"

 

[Boomawoom]

Highlight the hair, bring up the level's editor (Ctrl + L) then bring the middle slider to the left a bit and on the bottom bar bring the black slider to the right a bit.



I only did a fast selection for the hair so you'd have to spend a bit more time isolating it to get a better effect.

 

[Paul]

Thank you for the chance to play.

View attachment 15219

 

[ibclare]

You're likely done with this project but at first glance, what I see is not just an issue with the hair. I think it would benefit from deeper shadow around the outer face and neck. You can do this with a levels adjustment, then take a soft black brush and use it on the levels mask to remove the shadows you don't want. Paul did that with the interior of the face though I don't know by what method.

 

[Hoogle]

Looks to me like a bit of bleach bypass surface blur and vibrance\saturation adjustment layer

 

[Paul]

All i did was desaturate, moved the levels and did a slight liquify to some of the hair.