Exercise: Colours into tones 2

The aim of this exercise is to achieve a specific effect.

There are three different ideas for me to choose from,
 Landscape, not my strong point and something I am really not looking forward to doing a  whole module on.
Portrait My favourite and the one I have chosen.
Garden. I  have already included a few pictures of gardens in this section.

I was looking through some of my photographs and came across a couple of my young grandson, at the time he was a bit unsure about having his photograph taken, but the expressions are lovely on his face.

The top photograph has been de saturated in camera raw then opened in elements.
I then converted it using enhance remove colour, there is an option for portraits within this, which I used then I did further adjustments using the channel sliders. I lightened the red then also made smaller adjustments to the green and blue sliders before finally tweaking the contrast.
The complexion has been lightened considerably, however it has also adjusted the soft toy he is holding. This means this picture doesn't quite meet the criteria of the brief. therefore I processed a second photograph.

On this second set of photographs he looks much happier, again I de-saturated in camera raw before opening the photograph in elements, I made very similar adjustments again enhance, remove colour then adjusted the various sliders.

The one thing I have noticed is that by lightening the complexion it is possible to lose detail in the skin tones, care needs to be taken to make sure that areas aren't burnt out, something I feel is evident on the second photograph.

Overall the last two exercises have been very interesting, I am starting to think that elements may have its limitations, I have light room installed on my computer and I really think the time has come for me to experiment with it a lot more.