Thank you all for your very kind words.
Here are a couple of close ups plus two photos of the early stages of the work.
Elizabeth, thanx for the PS tip. The Burn/ Doge tools are very useful ones, indeed.
Garth, I am so flattered by your words. I do hope that this work(s) will bring me more portraits of other people, too
There were a lot of problems to be fixed in this painting. I've done this portrait from photo (and my experience with the previous painting.) There were two lighting source, the right one cooler than the (viewer's) left, and that couldn't have been fixed.
So, I have to compensate for that, and evaluate how the temperature of both light and of the shadow of the cooler, harsher light source would be if they had been the same as the left, softer one. I didn't want the unnatural hues or values jump on the sitter's face.
I contrived the background, and had to calculate the influence of that imagined greenish hue to the colors on my sitter, particularly on his face and highly reflected polished necklace.
Than there was the perspective of the table which was a bit distorted on the photo (notice the first stage of the painting). I haven't noticed it at first, and perhaps majority of viewers wouldn't noticed it too, but I felt it had to be corrected so I made some perspective drawing on the tracing paper and modified those until the table looked right.
And so on. But it paid.
My sitter was very pleased with both the first and the second portrait.