Nothing jumps out at me as being too bright-white (grabbing my eye on initial view), and the point you discussed about the jacket seems the right way to go.

Ed Shapiro manages the Pro Portraiture section. He is a commercial photographer with decades of experience. Rmalarz commented earlier in your thread. As you know, he is an expert with black and white, and I would accept his praise any day

Thanks for posting, Walt!

For me the real decider is the face. Not enough contrast and it would look flat and characterless. Too much and it would look too harsh and unflattering. I think you got it just right.

Some of the alternative sections for B&W portraits are Professional and Advanced Portraiture, People Photography and possibly Street Photography.

Agree - if you are happy, stop. It's yours, no matter what you do.

I think Linda already made the recommendation that you post your finished picture in a forum where you can ask others help for what they would do further with this image. When you see their helpful contributions, if you think they "improved" your "finished" picture, it's again up to you to decide if you are happy with the un-improved picture or if you might want to learn how to use some of this other software. ? If you do, ask questions. Ask for help and advice. You'll get tons of it. Then go and experiment at learning to develp capabilities you didn't originally know you needed..-

And, I think that answers your original question. Doesn't it?

Hi Walt,

I assume you are an amateur photographer... that you don't market and sell your images.

Since you have Nik filters and... especially... Adobe Elements, you really don't need Photoshop.

Photoshop is able to do some things that clients demand of pro photographers.... but are rarely if ever needed by amateurs. Elements can do virtually everything most amateurs will ever need... and even if they find it comes up short, I'd recommend trying a plug-in such as Elements + (Plus) before going out and getting Photoshop.

There are some advanced amateurs who need Photoshop for the things they do... but I'd argue they're the exception by a very large margin.

In fact, unless you shoot high volume of images, you probably don't need Lightroom, either. It's also geared toward the pros, though it's much more "user friendly" than Photoshop, and thus is used by a lot of amateurs too. I do agree that Lightroom can't truly "finish" an image. Most of its adjustments are global in nature and it's tools are quite crude, compared to Photoshop (AND Elements, for that matter).

I use Lightroom and Photoshop. But I shoot a lot of images and need the rapid "quick processing" of Lightroom, which is sufficient for "proof quality" thumbnails, small images that I provide to clients to make their selections.... But I ALWAYS finish images more fully in Photoshop, once the selections have been made and I know how the image will be used in greater detail. When I work with images in Lightroom I typically spend less than a minute, maybe less than 30 seconds on each one. But I often have to turn around 1000, 2000, 3000 or more images in a no more than a few days.... selecting the ones I'll provide to clients in proof quality, for further selection. Once they get back to me with what they've chosen and how they will be using it, I again use Lightroom to relocate the image, might do a few more quick tweaks to it there. (For example, I usually do any straightening that's needed and set up the crop in LR... But if client changes the aspect ratio, I may need to change the crop accordingly.)

Next I send the image to Photoshop and do the rest of the post-processing on it. How much will be needed varies. It can take only a few minutes or could be one or more hours of work. Really depends upon what will be done with the image, in the end. An 18x24" print requires a different level of work than a 5x7" print, for example. Much of what I do could be done in Elements, too. But there are a few things, such as setting a CMYK color space for printing purposes, which Elements doesn't support.

Photoshop is a very powerful and complex program. There are few short cuts and there's no built-in user support. To use it "right" and fully requires the equivalent of a stack of text books and a year's worth of college level classes. I largely "learned by using it", starting with version 4 in the mid-1990s when it was far simpler than today's Photoshop (some 10 or 12 versions later). But it's so complex that even today and after close to 25 years using it in progressive versions, I still often learn new things about Photoshop. It can be overwhelming to learn to use well. I bet a lot of today's subscribers never really do. Adobe isn't saying, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of subscribers only ever use Lightroom (much easier to learn)... and that more than a few don't renew their subscriptions or would only subscribe to Lightroom, if they could.

Before Adobe switched to the subscription model marketing Photoshop (and Lightroom), it was expensive and mostly only pros or very advanced amateurs would spend the $$$ to get started using it. Once you spend a lot of money buying the program, it just made sense to also buy the books and take the classes to learn to use it properly. Part of the "problem" today is that the subscription model Adobe uses now makes it seem "cheap" (It's not really, it actually costs about the same, over time. More about this below). A lot of people who don't really need it and probably should be buying something else figure "what the heck, it's only $10 a month"! And, because it "doesn't cost much", they think buying books or taking classes to learn to use it are a waste of money and time. Surely they can learn it from Youtube videos and posting a few questions on discussion forums like UHH! (Hint: No, they can't.)

Here's the thing... After the initial purchase of Photoshop "in the old days"... which was around $650 last time I recall... you didn't need to buy the "full version" again. Instead we installed the more frequent, free updates and just bought an upgrade version periodically. Personally I didn't buy every version, either. It generally worked out that instead I bought every other version. Lightroom sold for $100 initially and eventually rose to around $125, wasn't offered as an upgrade until the final version (from LR5 to LR6... and even then Adobe did a great job hiding the lower priced option, which was only available via their website as a download). But, again, you didn't need to buy every version of Lightroom. I think I skipped one or two.

When I went back and figured out what I'd spent on Photoshop and Lightroom over the years, it worked out to about $350 every three years, on average. Hey, that's almost exactly the same cost as today's subscription price, isn't it? $120 a year, three years = $360. Of course, I didn't get "auto updates". But I also didn't want them. (I've had too many problems with them over the years... So I usually wait to do updates only after a few weeks or a couple months, when they've been proven free of any problems. Just a few years ago Adobe had to quickly undo an update for Lightroom they'd pushed out, after it "crippled" the program for many users.)

Assuming you use it for around three years between purchasing a newer version, Elements works out to less than 1/3 the cost. That's even if you pay it's $100 "list price", if you don't get Elements on sale or bundled with something else. Fairly often it goes on sale for $25 or $30 less. Or, if you need to work with video too, it costs 25% less when bundled with Premiere Elements ($150 for both programs). Not to mention, Elements has a lot of built-in short cuts and user support... As well as active third party support with classes, tutorials, books and plug-ins, if needed.

You can see for yourself, if you wish. Download the free 30-day trial version from the Adobe website. Elements, Lightroom and Photoshop are all available that way... to test drive before you buy. To be honest, 30 days probably is nowhere near long enough to learn to use and evaluate the usefulness of Photoshop. Much longer is needed. It's probably sufficient time to try out LR or Elements, though not at the same time and I might suggest buying a relevant book first to have on hand for quick answers to the questions that are bound to come up as you learn it.

Have you tried the cataloging and organizing features of Elements? I know it's not as powerful as Lightroom, which may be necessary for larger volume users with big catalogs (I create a new LR catalog for each year and average between 40,000 and 60,000 images in each). I'm asking because, maybe you don't really need LR, either. Elements is sort of like a "lite" version of both LR and PS, combined into one stand-along, perpetually licensed program.

There are lots of things you can't do in Lightroom.

First image pair - self explanatory

Bird of Paradise flower - select flower, use as layer on top of a black-filled layer

Bridges - first image - straight out of the camera - second image -as far as I could take it in Lr - third image lots of local editing, sharpening, contrast/color/tone in numerous areas of the image.

Family portrait - selected family, created layer mask, inverted mask to select background - each saved as a layer mask - adjusted the background layer to reduce color saturation, contrast, brightness, then did my quick adjustments to the family on the other layer - this was a quick 3 minute edit just to show what is possible. I would likely spend another 3-5 mins to make a perfect mask and perhaps edit the family a little more for better color and tonal balance, etc.

And here is a full portrait edit that shows a technique called frequency separation:

https://petapixel.com/2013/10/13/photoshop-tutorial-retouching-shiny-skin/

And of course there is focus stacking.

The point is that in each of these cases, Lr falls short in that it can't be done or it takes a long time to do it. There are numerous other examples but I think the point is made.