After 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.
2 comments
permanent link
email this
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.