During our first full day in Havana, we visited the campus of the University of Havana. While exploring the hilltop campus location, I came across this student having a conference with what I assume is one of her professors. They were sitting near the end of a long hallway and the natural light was streaming in from the north – giving her face that special kind of diffused glow.
To complete the processing, I cropped the image significantly, using empty space as an offset in the darker area down the hallway on the left. I finished it using some Lab color tweaks in Photoshop along with a slight luminosity adjustment layer created using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 (see Doug Kaye’s technique for this).
I originally thought I’d process this as a monochrome image – but I loved the contrast between her reddish shirt and her teacher’s blue dress and wanted to maintain that look in the final image.