b-w version looks better to me; there are noticeable traces of face retouching in the right I feel a bit annoying to me, in the color one.
I cant answer your question.. I would be curious to see editing tricks and schemes that lead to distinctive popular results... cause I never was into learing this from YT or books. not sure. probably everything is out there, but you need to know beforehand half of the question, to ask it away, right?.. so I am not sure if it is worth big efforts.
Thank you for your time to comment on this one.
I do not know? Maybe posting an example of work you like and do not know how to do it would help to cooperate and backward engineer it? :)