Black on black

This was a hard one! It was almost impossible to get the dark

tones right in the 8 bit jpeg compression. With 16 or 32 bit

formats, no problems whatsoever. Comments appreciated.

oh, do not forget to view it larger!

I've never tried (exposure control-wise) anything like showing black on another kind of black background... but I think you've done it to perfection! The model's skin and blonde tones complement the black wonderfully too!

Great stuff!

Ok, now I've got my monitor recalibrated and it sure looks, like you say, quite critical. There are details on the monitor but for printing a lot will be lost at the dark end. According to what I see now, you could open lightness or gammaa a bit. The shadow side of the face could be 1/3..1/2 stops more open if the light side does not burn over.

Another way would be to process two jpgs from the RAW: on for the skin and another for the dark areas (sort of simple HDR, compress the 12 bits of RAW to 8 bits of jpg).

You've done very well wit the black on black. It makes her skin tones & hair really pop. There's a good separation between the tones of black in her clothing & the background