Self Portrait - Playing with flash

Did you do some post processing to get this dark?

I don't think it's necessarily too dark, in terms of the overall feel. There's mood and mystery, which is fine.

A few things, though. I'd be a little more drawn in if there were just a hint more of your left eye brought out. I think that would engage me more. Also, your teeth got a lot of the light here and, though your smile is nice, the light there might be a bit commanding. Mostly there's a steeliness to your skin tone (which I often find caused by flash) that could be eased up on in post processing and the reason I asked about post work is that your skin seems to have a grayish layer over it.

Thanks for your comments Fred.

I did do some post. This is actually an overlay of the color over a black&white. It both desaturates the image and darkens it. The issue is that it darkens the image too much sometimes and I'm not sure whether I need to overexpose a bit or just lighten it up in post after doing the overlay.

Here is the original.

It does seem like you could have increased the exposure a little.

But it seems like it would be very workable in post processing.

Why the overlay instead of using some of the desaturate tools. Are you after a more pastel feel by including the black and white layer, or a more 50s kind of old photo feel? It would depend, and of course there could be other feels you're going for. But I generally tend to use a combination of overall desaturation, selective color desaturation, and overlay color balance filters to get those sorts of results. That graying quality brought in by the black and white layer would disturb me except in instances where I really wanted that effect. I'm not sure you do here.

Fred,

I appreciate your suggestions.

I decided to revisit the image and ended up going B&W, which turned out much better IMO.

Thank you for the help.