Oh hai, I've upgraded ur cat

[falafelicious]

Before:


After:


As you can see, the SOOC image was underexposed. Thankfully the photo was shot in RAW which gave me a lot of flexibility in terms of adjusting the exposure after the fact, which I did in Adobe Camera Raw.

After correcting the levels, I opened the image in Photoshop and adjusted the white balance to warm up the image a bit and remove the green color cast. Using duplicate layers and layer masks so that only the cat was selected, I reduced the unnatural tones on his fur with saturation sliders, bringing him closer to being a truly black and white cat instead of a black, red, blue, cyan and white cat.

Then I manipulated the curves to give the picture a little contrast-y "pop," partially masking out the white on the kitty's forehead to avoid blowing the highlights. Finally, I selected the kitten's eyes and pulled the curves up just a smidge to give them some brightness.

[Tito87]

A job well done.

[yulchick]

So cute! Def brought the photo to life!

[falafelicious]

Thanks! Flickr always seems to increase the contrast a little but you get the idea...

[lostsmitty]

This looks really great. I think the work you did really brought some depth to the photo.

[SusanH1970]

Looks great! If you don't mind a suggestion, I would just crop it a bit tighter, and clone out the blue from her collar. What a little cutie!