I spend a lot of time studying Ansel Adams, Nick Brand, Brassard and Sebastiano Salgado workflow.
They had all in common, this very dramatic dodge and burn that guides the eye of the viewer on the main story of the photo. I did a lot of study on Ansel Adam book call the negative where he explains his workflow called the ‘Zone System’ where he assigned to each part of the photo a certain grey value.
The results were Incredibles strong images fine art black and white at its finest.
I did a lot of tests with Silver FX Pro, Photoshop Curves and finally Lightroom. After 100’s of hour of trial and error, it HIT me!
The ONLY way to achieve drama in the post processing of the photo was to imitate in Lightroom what the master were doing in the dark room using local tools to dodge and burn the photo. Indeed, the eyes goes go the brighter part of the photo!