(Iris Murdoch's somewhat lengthy tale of one man's unrequited love, set mainly in and around a lonely old house perched by the sea)

This is a cracker of a book - I'm a late-comer to Iris Murdoch's work, but having read most of her later work I enjoyed this one the most by far

A complete studio set-up shot today, no pretentions at being 'au naturel'!! There was a fair bit of ambient light but a smidgeon of off-camera flash helped to illuminate the shells a bit better. The RAW file was opened into Camera Raw as always - I brought up the Exposure a notch to bring out more of the lovely highlights and mid-tones; I added about 30% Clarity as well, then opened into CS3. As usual, I duplicated the layer, and duplicated again. The first layer I converted to B&W via Channel Mixer (Infrared preset) and changed the Blending Mode to Screen. The second duplicate was a repeat of the first, except I used the Green preset in Channel Mixer, and set the Blending Mode to normal. I lessened the second layer's Opacity to around 45% - this made the highlights of the first layer really come through while still retaining good shadow and mid-tones across the piece. I flattened the image, added the first pass of Smart Sharpen (65% at 2px), then another of 100% at 0.5px, finally resizing for the web

Wednesday 13th's sand-in-the-sandwiches-and-jellyfish-on-the-beach entry to the Challenge; click here for other monochromed Pbasers in January