A technique that I find to be quite compelling is to desaturate the colors in a portrait. At the same time, by adding clarity in the Adobe Camera Raw (or Lightroom) dialog box and/or by applying the tonal contrast filter in Nik Software's Color Efex Pro 4 for a gritty look, portraits like this elderly woman in Vietnam take on a unique, artistic, and engaging look. To reduce the saturation of color, I use Photoshop's pull down menu command, Image > adjustments > hue/saturation and simply move the saturation slider to the left. In this particular shot, I also darkened the background so various elements behind the woman weren't distracting. My settings for this shot were 1/125, f/5, 640 ISO, and I used the new 100-400mm lens from Canon. This enabled me to shoot a frame-filling portrait from a distrance.
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