This is a snapshot with a future in our family. It captures one of those pivotal moments in family life. My wife and I were picking out a puppy. We had leaned toward one who didn't seem too interested and as we were talking about it I felt a tug at my shoe lace. I picked up this fellow who seemed quite interested and handed him to my wife. Prince the White German Shepherd was and is quite good at selling his point of view. Is there any doubt about who was going to be in the car on the way home? And yes, those are big paws.
What is needed to turn this into an image telling a story? The first step is to analyze the image:
- The lights in the kennel have given the image a strong color cast. That will need to be removed.
- The bottom quarter of the image adds nothing to the story and needs to be cropped out.
- The camera was held at a slight angle and the image is a bit tilted.
- There is a dark object that looks as if it is growing out of the dog's head. It needs to be cloned out.
- Midtone contrast may need to be adjusted.
- Image saturation may need to be adjusted.
- The image will probably need to be resized.
- Any digital image needs to be sharpened.
- The image will probably end up not being a standard size (5 X 7, 8 X 10, etc.) and it would be nice to create a mat-like border to flesh the image out to a standard size and avoid having to buy or cut a custom size mat.
These are the issues we will address here. We will address them in a somewhat different order from the order in which we analyzed it.
The first commandment of image editing is that thou shalt not mess with the Background layer unless you KNOW it is safe. It is generally a good idea to work with a copy of the original image. You can do this by going to File > Save as and saving under a new name.
If you are using Elements there is one step where we will be messing with the Background layer. This is one of those times where it would be an excellent idea to work with a copy of the original image.
We will begin by correcting the tilt.
