CATURDAY ART

This is the picture we chose for todays Caturday Art, thinking it was an interesting photo ~ but far from acceptable "as is".  It probably would have been fine with just some minor tweaking, but I decided to go further, and really alter it a lot.  Here are a few of the basic steps and tools used to create the image below, all in Adobe Creative Cloud, lots of steps: not work, fun!

De-TAILS:

1. The image first needed to be rotated, straightened and cropped, I preferred to crop to a square.

2. Cropping meant losing June's tail, so it was copied/cloned and layered back on in the new image.

3. June was outlined/silhouetted and copied.  The copy was pasted onto the window shade layer and reduced in size and faded to a percentage that was acceptable so as to appear as a shadow.  

4. Then the same outline/silhouette was re-selected: it was highlighted fully with the dodging tool, and then selectively on the edges again with the dodging tool.  Lastly, the dodge tool, super small, was used to highlight her eye.

5. The far right window blinds were selected and the sandstone filter was applied lightly to this section.

6. A crackled filter was applied to the perch on which she is sitting.

7. At this point, the altered image was reasonably acceptable to me.  Sometimes though I just keep going, and this time decided I did want to do more.

8. I selected each section of the window on the layer behind June, and applied a different color tint, usually just 25-35% of a pastel color to that section and the entire background was slightly blurred/softened. 

9. All PSD layers were merged into a single PNG image and a thick black rule border was applied.  

Below: our Caturday Art image.