I think that one of my photos will be published

[kundalini]

A local paper is doing an article about the animal shelter that I volunteer at. I was given a call and asked if I could take a photo of Zack, the house cat, and an adoptable dog for the article. I zipped up to the shelter, took shots with Zack and a couple of different dogs in the conference room, zipped back home, some fast and furious edits and wound up with four that I submitted to the coordinator. She liked this one, enough so that her message was it is now her compute's wallpaper. It's not bad, but tell me what you think.

Zack's leg is blown out, but dodge & burn is not one of my strong points. A bit of quick instruction would be greatly appreciated.

http://i200.photobucket.com/albums/aa199/kundalini2737/mia-zack.jpg


Cheers.........

[Overread]

I like it!
A bit of a shame that the animals are not looking at you - though one would hope this could be positioned on a left page or to the left of the written text (one hopes)
Really great interaction though so that should get the aww feelings out - also a tricky shot with two sets of eyes - you clearly got the cat and he is the moving subject - the dog is very nearly out of focus on the eyes - its a close call but you pulled it off :)

When I use burn I have it set to around 7% intensity and then I go over the area bit by bit - if you pause and use a few clicks rather than just a big movement of the brush you can use the undo command to go back a step if you go too far. I have never used dodge before.

[PhotoJet]

The other thing you can try is to reduce the contrast. Most people think that contrast just makes things sharp, but it can blow out 'whites' very quickly.

[johngpt]

I realise I'm a day late and a dollar short, but I'm finally getting to look in the gallery.

I think what makes this photo great is the coordination of gaze of both cat and pooch.

I just downloaded the image and was able to reduce the blowout of the cat's white fur a bit.

If you're using photoshop (not sure if Elements has this feature), in the menu bar, click Select, then click on Color Range. From the Color Range dialog options, choose 'Highlights' and click OK. The 'marching ants' will have selected all the highlight areas of the image. Then click on adjustment layer and choose either Levels or Curves. I chose Curves, and dragged the curve downward a bit. I then clicked on the layer mask and blacked out all but the cat's fur.

It seemed to add some more depth to the cat's legs.

[johngpt]

I took a couple screenshots. This first is the layer mask after using Select>ColorRange>Highlights, then blacking out the pooch's fur.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3641/3430289877_8432306622.jpg


The second is the curves adjustment layer.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3558/3431102156_1dd78fca7f_o.jpg

Since the image isn't mine, I didn't save what I had done.

[Lensmeister]

Just a point to say.... Local papers are not that interested in 100% technical quality. I have been published in a couple of local papers and the tend to put in what they think is good.

I was a t a game the other week and the next day I was asked for fpour photos of the game. I sent in three really top quality ones with the brightness, contrast and hue adjusted and they chose the one I only sharpened and it never even had much action in it. So thing to remember is .... go for it and get paid ;)