Highlighting an individual's face in a sports team b&w photo

[spyderbryin]

Hi

I am using Photo V2 and would love to find a way to bring to the "forefront" three different players in a football team photo. My story is about these individuals so I would like to enhance their faces and/or maybe to slightly dull the remainder of the picture. 

Is anyone aware of an idea, or could there even be a support video that will show me such a technique? (I have looked but don't really know how my request can be explained in a short phrase!

I visualise the enhancement being in the shape of a circle or an oval shape/

Thanks 

[thomaso]

If you just want to highlight certain areas you could darken their surrounding. This could easily + flexible be done with vector objects combined to a Compound Group where the spots (ellipses) are subtracted from their common rectangle and the entire group gets the wanted colour (e.g. gray), transparency and blend mode applied (e.g. multiply). For instance:

If wanted you could additionally apply a blurring layer effect to the ellipse layers.

[spyderbryin]

2 minutes ago, thomaso said:

If you just want to highlight certain areas you could darken their surrounding. This could easily + flexible be done with vector objects combined to a Compound Group where the spots (ellipses) are subtracted from their common rectangle and the entire group gets the wanted colour (e.g. gray), transparency and blend mode applied (e.g. multiply). For instance:

If wanted you could additionally apply a blurring layer effect to the ellipse layers.

That's really helpful @thomaso thank you once again!

[NotMyFault]

Beside lightness, you could use

• blurring / sharpening 
• frames 
• loupe / zoom effect (copy 3 persons on own layer and increase size)
• perspective distortion of background layer (keep copy of main persons in front)

[thomaso]

2 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

loupe / zoom effect (copy 3 persons on own layer and increase size)

… or don't increase them as 1 layer but rather as three separate layers, each from its own centre midpoint to keep each of the three zoomed details near its original position in the entire image.

Or …
         • background in grayscale, focussed areas in colour
         • backround pixelated (e.g. halftone effect)