Before and After and After again!

I posted the enhanced version of today’s ‘before and after’ image on my photo-blogand received the following comment: “good portrait wud have added much more character had it been converted into b&w…”So naturally, I had to give a try.

The first image was produced by a Beta Version of ACDSee Pro. I had just downloaded it to test it as a productivity tool for the wedding I had just finished shooting. It has a decent set of tools for manipulating images and allows for batch manipulation. I think I like it.

Any way, I was using the sharpening tool, and tried an experiment I had seen demonstrated. I liked the result so much I didn’t even think of trying any thing else.

My kids think that the original image has the look of Santa. The second one they think looks like a wizard. I think the B&W version allows for the effects of the extreme sharpening to come through but brings the image back to reality. In the B&W version the man looks like a man.

What do you think?
Original:

The result after extreme sharpening:

The B & W version: