Neolite: pic 1034 looks ok. Contrast, background,...ok. Only detail is that the top of his head isn't on the pic. But if that's ok by you, it's ok by me.
Sheba: the quality of this photograph is very high, but as a painter, I would always try to render a young girl's skin on very smooth paper so as not to show the typical structure of a "lived" skin.
You can of course join the fun with your pic here, as many techniques that Mark, me, and hopefully others will share will also be useful for other purposes.
Let's continue a bit.
Suppose you have the numbers 1 to 100 written on a sheet of paper and you may chechmark 46 of them, including 1 and 100, what will be the result?
You will start with including 1 and 100, leaving you 44 numbers to fill in 98 places. So you will try to spread the checkmarks evenly, but there will be gaps.
The same happens when you force a histogram to cover the full range from black to white.
When it does not cover the full range (see previous entry: use Alt-drag to see where there are no values) and you drag, say, the black triangle to where there starts showing something, you actually instruct photoshop to interpretate that value as black (or the darkest value of your colour R, G or B). As the original did not have values for the part you dragged, PS will have to spread out what's available, and this will cause gaps.
These gaps are values that are missing in the range of hues.
And this is why we need to start with a histogram that covers as good as possible the full range between black and white.
Unless we search for a greyed-out effect.
But what about highkey and lowkey? Highkey should have many values (high mountains) in the lighter part (right-hand side), but should ideally still have a tad of full black. Lowkey needs the opposite: the montains on the left, and only a tad on the right.
What we need here, is a combination of both of these: oversaturated darks, and too much contrast in the lights. Indeed: no simple burned-out lights, but too much edge contrast so that the pores/structure of the skin is exaggerated.
This is very difficult to do on one layer. Best is to use at least two. One for the darks, and one for the lights. As we then will have to instruct photoshop which areas must be used of each ne, we will have to select them. Best way to do this is by using masks.
Now we have a strategy how to attack.
But wait. We have to draw that "aura" around the figure, and we might have to do something different with the background. Ahhh...we'll have to create a selection of the figure also.
As seen, this is easiest by choosing a channel that is rich in contrast. Which one would you choose?
(Sheba, feel free to use your husband's pic
)
Creating this effect 
Linear Mode
