Joe, the original shot was taken about 10 years ago now at a photographic club studio session, using a couple of models we coaxed in off the street :) If you know what those sessions are like... you don't get much chance to play around with the lighting. The film would be Ilford FP4 with standard home processing in Ilford chemicals.

I've attached a crop from the staright scan I used for the image. The main thing I wanted to do in PS, apart from sharpening it up, was to darken the upper corner areas. To do this I added two extra layers. I used the linear gradient tool to produce gradients from black to transparent, running from each corner towards the centre. I then used the 'dodging' tool to clean out the gradients where they ran into the models. I did this pretty hurriedly, which caused the 'halo' effect. I would guess there are ways to do it more carefully, but I'm on the bottom of the learning curve for PS :) I used Gaussian blur to soften the edges of the gradients and Gassian noise to simulate the film grain in them ..... LOL ..well you did ask :)

No problem about buggin' me... hope the reply makes sense... let me know if it doesn't.

take care,

Mike