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email thisAfter Phil shared a link to Photosig.com I've been looking at other folks techniques and reading some of their comments. Something that has been hard for me to figure out is how to take a subject in a busy background, like a squirrel in the trees, and bring out the squirrel. Here's my first attempt, with a before and after touchup shot.
 before |  after |
Still needs some work, but how about them buck teeth! Actually I don't even think it's teeth, just a lighting coincidence.
Audacity, an open souce audio editor was released the other day. Of note is that it was written using wxWindows, which is an open source cross-platform GUI Framework. I've been learning another cross-platform framework, QT 3.0 which is also free for non-commercial projects and costs a couple grand for commercial development. It's pretty cool to be able to develop something on OS X, ftp the source over to a windows box and have it running in a couple of minutes.
how did you soften the background lighting through the leaves? I have often had this problem with digital photography and it is one of my peeves. I haven't done much experimenting to fix this though
I made a copy of the layer and on the topmost layer I used Extract in photoshop to removed everything but the squirrel (I should have included the frontmost branches). Then I went to the background layer, blurred it and changed brightness. Doing it in layers like this avoids the halo you'd normally get with trying to make adjustments to selections.
I'll have to try it again with the foreground branches on the same layer as the squirrel.