Photoshop: Exploring different looks

As all digital photographers know, capturing the 'raw' data is only the start of the photographic process. Although it is is not universally used: Photoshop and Lightroom are considered the 'go to' tools when creating your digital art.

Today, being a Bank Holiday, means that I have a few hours free in-between my household and gardening chores, and looking after my wife, who is struggling with crutches at the moment :-( 

Plenty of time to experiment with my new A3 LED lightbox :-)

The technique I've been trying, is to capture a high key bracket set and post process as layers in Photoshop: no HDR tone mapping here!

Once in Photoshop, it is a simple matter to explore different 'looks'. 

For example, in the first image below I went for a basic high key look; whilst in the second image I carried out some inversion and channel swapping.

Two different images: but both created from the same capture data.

...and finally: this interpretation.