Bob's dog.

[MixedHerbs]

This is a friend's dog called Evie. My friend is delighted with the photograph, but I cannot help thinking it needs a bit more work, the trouble is, I have no idea what. I am using UFRaw and GIMP, but am still learning. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Peter.

[tameigh]

I don't know how it is called in gimp, but in photoshop, the first thing I would do to make it "pop" a little more would be to adjust "levels" to kind of balance the exposure. If it is the same as photoshop, you bring up the left slider and down the right slider to make the histogram take up the whole curve, and then play with the middle slider until you like it. You can play around will all of them actually, but that would be my first move.

I might also apply a slight dollop of a warming filter, since the image looks "cool" to my eye.

[jeeperman]

Peter, here is a quick go at the pup. I also used gimp and this is what I did. I first went into colors and then levels to adjust the white balance, also in the colors list I adjusted the contrast a small bit. I then used a little localized dodging on the eyes and sharpened them slightly with the unsharp mask in the filters list. I then went back and sharpened the whole image with another pass of the unshap mask. Be careful with this tool as you can over do things very easily. Hope this helps.

[rob marshall]

Peter

Dark dog, light road - bad business. I cropped most of the road out, then selected it (in Photoshop) and reduced the brightness. Then I reversed the selection to include the dog and applied some contrast to make the dog more punchy (or should that be bitey!)

There is the histogram of your shot. You can see how it lacks far-end whites and blacks, which is why the shot overall looks slightly flat. Dark animals are tricky - you can overexpose on the camera but if you have a light background that only makes it worse. I would have chosen a darker backdrop, but then maybe Evie didn't want to move...

[jeeperman]

And that is one reason I am here.....to learn. I had not even dealt with the road and it makes quite the difference.

Looking back I infact made the road worse.

[tameigh]

Hey! We should have a Bob's Dog mini competition.



I did what I described, but did a little burning to bring down the fur highlights.

White balance still does not seem right to me though, but I couldn't fix it with my limited skill set. I think the bluish cast is the major problem with the image.

[jiro]

If you have unwanted background (or not so pleasing), extracting the main subject is usually a good way to recover the image. Once you extracted the main subject and put it in a new layer, you can now adjust and do whatever you want on the background. You can either blur it, darken it, or even change it completely (if you prefer another background to go with the subject). It takes some practice to do masking or extracting but once you get the hang of it, it's a very powerful tool to work on a very challenging image.

I use photoshop (Sorry, I don't know how to use GIMP and I don't have one yet) and I did extract the dog so I can adjust and darken the background. Something like this:

[MixedHerbs]

Thank you all for your help.

The dog was concentrating on a girl dog and was oblivious to me. I agree, the road is a problem. I have no knowledge about masking and extracting, but will read up on the subject and give it a try.



Peter.