This was taken many years ago in London with a $75 Fujica SLR (pentax spotmatic copy). I used two desktop lamps. The ones with the bendy stand. One was places just above the subject to my right. This was the 'key' light that produces the shadows... (modeling). The other was just placed as far back in the room as possible pretty much facing the subject and about as high as the 'key' light. This is called the 'Fill' light. As it fills the shadow area with light, just enought to discern some detail. Years later, I dug out this print and brought it into photoshop just to see what I could do with it. The one on the left is the result. It was pretty easy. Here's how... Firstly I made a circular selection around the face area. I then inverted the selection and feathered it. I think it was about 25 pixels. This depends on the size of the image. The bigger the image, the bigger you can feather. With the inverted circular selection showing I added a 'zoom' radial blur at about %60. I repeated the steps of the inverted circular selection only this time I made the original selection bigger. Just inside the hair area. I then lowered the brightnes in the outside are to produce a black vignette effect. Lastly I colorized the whole image blue and sharpened it with and 'unsharp Mask'. Comments welcome. Colm...

Thanks for posting this tutorial Colm! If you have more, well, post em mate!Always welcome to me!

I wish I had the chance to manipulate/digitally enhance my photos. Unfortunately, the only place I can get my photos scanned now is at school and our scanner there is somewhat dodgy..it lets light in while scanning and I always end up with white stripes across my photos.. We also don't have any picture editing programs apart from Microsoft Photo Editor...so my pictures are always kinda 'raw'... sigh Any ideas what I can do about that? I'd love to learn this stuff...and improve my photos before they go on the web..

Thanks for posting, there are no enough tutorials about manipulating photos.

Well if it is letting light in, why not try covering it with something. A dark sheet or a coat. You coud also try covering your photo with black card on the scanner. I haven't ever encountered this problem so I am not sure about the solution. Ok, microsoft PE isn't great. You say this is at school. Do you have a computer at home??? If so what software have you access to at home? If you can cure the scanning prob, then you could put your pics on a floppy to take then home. Colm...

Oh at home..where I am now....this computer is a bloody joke...can't make anything run on it. I actually have Photoshop on a CD, and I tried installing it but this computer just doesn't have enough space to run it (thanks to the game junkies in the house) so I am a little lost for what to do. I've tried covering up the scanner while scanning but I still get those annoying streaks of light across my photos. It's quite annoying but oh well..I normally scan my photos at school and upload them from home. Although this isn't really my 'home', that's why I can't do what I like with the computer. I'm living here for a while...while I go to school here in New Zealand. When I go back to Norway, where I'm from, everything will be sweet...got my own puter there at least... The computer equipment I have now though, is just crap and it annoys the hell out of me! But I better stop moaning and make the most of what I have. We used to have Paint Shop Pro but now we can't make that run anymore....Oh and my browser doesn't work properly either, so a lot of the time I can't view what's posted here properly. This computer is seriously stuffed up, when I start up and it goes through Bios I get a big fat juicy message saying 'BIOS not installed!' Gah.. I miss my computer! ~M~

Ok... Here is what to do... When everybody in the house is out. Format the hard drive, thus erasing all the games and crap. Put on Windows and Photoshop and away you go. But... That's going to annoy the hell out of all the people you live with...:) That's very weird... 'BIOS' not installed.... Colm...