Koku Directions 3rd place

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This work earned 3rd for Best Directions

~Subsolar's Original Description

Entered as part of the thing they've got running over at FixMyPic [link] where members have the chance to fix a photo provided in any way they see fit. Here's my "fix". With that said and done, here are the steps I followed to achieve the look you see above. Note: This was all done in Photoshop CS2 (lower versions can achieve this too however).

I felt that the image of the puppy dog was a nice idea, but the background was a bit too "noisy" or distracting so to speak, so I pretty much just tried to emphasize the dog as much as possible, and tone down the background details.

*Before starting, duplicate your base layer*

Step1:
Ok first thing after importing the image into Photoshop was to basically adjust the levels of the image (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels). Adjusting the levels is good for adding more contrast to the photo, as it defines the darker and lighter areas of the image, removing the haze you get on alot of photos. Just play around with the sliders until you get soemthing acceptable. It only usually requires very minor tweaks, nothing drastic. If you want my exact input levels that I used, they are: 15, 1.09, 227

Step2:
Next step was to create a selection around the dog, so that we can just work on it, or the background seperately. I used the Lasso Tool for this, but you can use the pen tool. With the lasso tool, you basically just create a rough shape around the dog, don't worry if it's not perfectly straight, and then you either shift+click to add areas to your selection or alt+click to remove areas. Using this method you can refine your selection so it's more accurate. Once you have that selection down, you can right click and select "feather". Set the value to something around 5px. This makes the edges of the selection a little fuzzier, and blend into the background a little, which is a good thing

Step3:
With this selection active, you can now goto Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Brightness/Contrast. Play with these settings a little bit. I nudged the settings here by around +15 in both brightness and contrast, just to bring little doggy more into focus. Upon clicking OK, you will notice the layer only affects your selection, thus making a mask.

Step4:
You can now ctrl+click on this mask layer (in the layers window) to make the selection active again, and this time goto Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation. I dropped the saturation down to around -20, as I wanted a less vivid feel to the image. You can play with these values as you see fit. Click ok.

Step5:
Ctrl-click a mask layer to bring up the selection again, and this time goto Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Color Balance. I basically nudged up the red values up a few points, as well as the yellow values, in shadows and highlights as well as in midtones. I was basically just trying to bring out some of the natural colours in doggy's fur. Adjust these as you see fit.

Step6:
Ok we're almost done with doggy, time to move onto the background details. Ctrl-click one of your masked layers to bring up that selection again, and this time, whilst you have the lasso tool active, click on the selection and choose the "Select Inverse" option. This now selects the stuff around the dog. With this new selection, goto your original, duplicated image, and click "duplicate layer". On this duplicated layer, click the little "Add Vector Mask" in the layers menu, and now goto Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. You only want a little blur, just to take the focus off of the BG. I did around 3.5 - 4.5 pixels of blur. Click ok.

Step7:
Get your bg selection active once again, by ctrl-clicking on your masked "blur" layer. Now goto Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation. To further reduce the impact of the background, I washed out the colours by desaturating way down to around -70. Adjust as you see fit.

Step8:
Ctrl-click your masked layer again and this time, Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Brightness/Contrast and bring down these values. I did around -20 brightness and -10 contrast.

*Before continuing, make sure your "Levels" layer is at the top of your layer stack. If not, then make sure you drag it to the top, so it affects everything we've done up to this point *

Step9:
Ok those are more or less my adjustments done. Now for some cropping/framing. The composition I was generally happy with, and there wasn;t alot of room for any fancy crops anyway, so I really just lopped off the left part of the image, so that there was about a centimetre (or half-inch) between the left side of the image and doggy's ear. I left the bottom of the pic how it is, as I wanted a more of a taller photo, so it kinda looks like a doggy portrait, but with a profile shot of the dog, rather than a head-on.

Step10:
After that, I resized the image so that it was 600px wide. This is just a personal preference when posting pics on the Internet, it can be whatever you want.

Step11:
Next I increased the canvas size by around 40-50 pixels on each side. So the image would now be 600px + 80-100px, and the height would be the height + 80-100px, too. You should get a blank canvas border around your image now. Make a new blank layer, fill it with black, and send it right down to the very bottom of your stack.

Step12: Ok last step and we're done! I double clicked on the the layer icon in the stack containing our dog, and went down to the "stroke" option. I set the stroke to be 1px wide, outside, 100% opacity, color: white.

Saved the image as jpeg and we're done! Enjoy