Artistic with LightZone

I played during the last weekend with LZ and tried to find ways how to create little different look to my photo.

My daughter was going to a masquerade ball, dressed in black dress, red shoes and red masque with yellow feathers. Here is the original image with the in-camera settings.

I had an external flash placed quite near on the right and a white door facing my daughter. The setting gave the strong shadow on the white wall and still the reflecting light illuminated her face.

In LZ I set

• the WB to 6000K and decreased exposure by 1/3
• applied standard Canon 600D raw tone curve
• added vibrance (+30) to mids & highlights
• softened the skin with standard style "Skin Glow" and changed the skin color to match the skin in the image
• added color to masks and shoes with additional Saturation +20 and Vibrance +10 (2 × Hue/Saturation tool: applying to red and yellow)

This was now quite good standard portrait. But I wanted to do some more. I wanted to create an image that looked like made bt "Andy Warhol". I used Gaussian Blur on mids & highlights and highly over-did it. I set the radius to 150 to achieve the result below.

I'm happy with the final result and also that I could achieve all in LZ. The tool stack helped to experiment and revert to previous version easily and I didn't have to work with multiple tools and copies.

If you want the get really psychedelic results, use large radius and set the blend mode to difference.