Thursday, November 5, 2009

22/365 - Glowy Trixabug

22/365 - Glowy Trixabug

Time for a more concrete, recognizable photo, I think. ;o)

This is obviously Trixie out for a walk (on the pad, incidentally). I was lying on my stomach in the grass to get this photo. Or actually, I was lying there to get photos of her chewing a stick, but then she got up and walked around a little, so this was just a bonus shot.

Today, I thought it might be fun to show the before and after of the photo of the day.    The "after" is the one above, of course.  Here's what the "before" looked like (with absolutely no editing except for resizing and saving for the web):



(You can see it bigger by clicking it, if you like.) 

Here's what I did to get it from point A to point B: 
I cropped it, resized it, and used Curves to adjust the colors (lightened mainly, I think).  I then used the lasso tool (set to a slight feathering) to select only Trixie, copied my selection and pasted it onto a new layer.  I did this because I wanted to "ortonize" the photo (to give it that soft-focus, dreamy look), but I've learned that Eskies don't generally respond well to ortonizing.  They tend to lose all detail, and the eyes and nose become three black holes.  (Even more than usual, so you know it's bad. (g))  After that, I duplicated the whole photo (so that there were now three layers-- two with the whole photo and one with just Trixie's portion visible).  I ortonized the whole photo, making sure the Trixie-only layer was on top.  This way, the background got the dreamy, glowy look, but Trixie stayed in focus.  I put an Unsharp Mask filter on top of the Trixie-only filter to further sharpen it, and I think that was about it. . .

I'm sure there are other ways to achieve the same effect, but so far, this way is working for me. 

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