Jake....why not the pp look you had before? I think it's because you didn't want to darken that gal's skin that'sshwin' her belly button (almost).
Here's the thing, it
is the same PP method. I've got a preset in Silver Efex Pro 2 called "Farmer's Market" that gets applied to the people shots, and most of the rest. How their skin looks afterward depends a lot on how it looked beforehand. Of the shots above, only the old couple didn't get the B&W luminosity mask. Paler skin tends to be less affected, whereas skin that has seen sun or has spots will be moreso. Look at the shot of the kid. With the girl and her grandmother I played with a preset I'd built doing the Musikfest shots that has a bit more Glow
before adding the luminosity mask. It also has a detail enhancement filter, so if there was something to bring out there it would have.
So, while these may seem different, they are largely different because the people and light were different that day. Here's another shot of the girl and her grandmother that didn't make the cut and hadn't been deleted yet. With the "normal" treatment you can see that the skin tones are similar, it's just that the Color Efex preset I ran first added some warmth and glow to the initial colors, and brightened the whites a bit. If you look at the yellow "Walk/Don't Walk" box behind them you can see that the same change in the normal yellow of the box due to the color filtration in the B&W luminance mask layer and
that is what induces the change in the skin tones.
So I've done nothing different really other than softening the lines a little on one shot and applying a different edit to the older couple.