Experiment: Desaturation, Part II

So, I have had a dry spell for the past week, but I'm hoping to get out and shoot a bunch this weekend -- our weather is finally getting awesome.

But, I've been browsing forums and websites lately, lusting after the 24LII and drooling over images people have taken with it. So I turned to my 85mm, hands-down the best portrait lens in my [teeny tiny] kit, at the mo to satisfy my desire for delicious, fast prime goodness.

Here's a shot I took of the mister as he was watching Lost on the PC with headphones, too eager to wait til I was ready to join him (we started from the beginning and just finished the first season).

It was at ISO 800 with my 85mm, f/2. In Lightroom, I desaturated it by about -50, upped the contrast a bit, and applied noise reduction and some vignetting:

I'm not sure if it works at all. Desaturation is my love of the moment, so I think I like it, but I'm not sure if it's universally appealing.

Also, as a side note, it looks noisier here on the web than it does in LR. Probably has something to do with the JPEG conversion. I read recently that you should save your files as .tiff after your edit them (and are converting from RAW) because that will introduce the least amount of artifacts? Or it will save as much image quality as possible? Something like that. But from my understanding, you can't post .tiff files on the web -- only .jpg will do for that. So there's no way to avoid JPEGs if I want to continue sharing on this site (which I do!).

Unfortunately, I've been dying to experiment with wide angles and low shots (no idea where I got the idea for that), but I don't have any lenses for that! Daaamn! The lust after full frame and the 24L continues.