Pam and I have been on a Dragan Quest - trying to pick up hints from some of the comments that Andrzej has left in the various forums where his pictures are posted. There was one passage that was unclear and I emailed him asking for clarification. Here's the passage:

"I've written a little about the technique at my website, however a lot in
this photo was done with a blue filter mixed with the other layers in many
fancy ways (including soft light effect or just normal sandwich). Blue
filtering is by the way one of the best and easiest tricks I've discovered
for portraiture, and it adds a lot of dramatism. The reason is simple: human
skin has a lot of imperfections, which are mainly red-colored. So after
processing through such a filter they get enhanced. Similarily a red filter
is smoothing the skin, which is probably an obvious fact for professional
fashion photographers (it is amazing, why this is not taught in any photo
manuals). The effect of this photo is this a combination of carefull color
filtering (using several layer effects) combined my "usual" retouching
technique. I hope this helps. Cheers!"

My question was basically 'you're talking in terms of "filters" but do you mean "channels" here?

"I believe that many analog photographers aware of that use traditional blue filters on their lenses and shoot on BW films. At least I would if there was no PS ;-) Anyway, what I meant was using a blue channel."

What we figured, but now verified ;-) He closed with ....

"BTW, please send my greetings to dpreview retouchers :)

Cheers,
Andrzej"

Done!
--
Kent
http://www.pbase.com/kentc