just another jaguar.....

[peeperita]

i went back to the zoo today and tried to work on my out of the camera technique...marginally better images this week, but still a lot of shots that just didn't cut it....

like this one....


i didn't have very many shots of him and this was a rare opportunity because i had called in a favor with the zoo manager who was kind enough to take me on a behind the scenes tour.....images with wire gridding the field were cut by two thirds!.....

anyway, i felt like taking more than a minute to edit it and came out with this......



i started to think about this thread the poster said the shot was important to her and jiminy clicket posted an edit where he completely changed the quality and direction of the light.....

i took my cue from there and without going into too much tedious detail, i'll recap what i did....besides the crop, i really only kept making different selections from the image, placing them on separate layers, making blending mode and opacity decisions, altering the direction of the light little by little... .....there were a couple of areas like the overly bright foreground leaves and that pole he was resting on that i painted over with very dark co-ordinating colors....bluring and reducing the opacities on those too......one of the last layers i applied was a blurred selection set to darken that gave an interesting effect that i buried a few layers down....

if we were still in the seventies, i'd paint it on black velvet.....

if i wasn't specific enough, please ask all the questions you like....

thanks for looking

peeper

[lputman]

wow peeper, you took an ordinary shot and turned it into an extraordinary image.

[private]

its amazing what are capable of doing...

[FocalFrenzy]

Very impressive, Peep. I agree that this would look amazing on black velvet, (I've had 2 Black Velvet and Cokes, and it still looks amazing! LOL). Do you, or any of the "Post-Processing" geniuses at DPS, know how to acheive this using GIMP?

[Sir Alain]

WOW! What an awesome transformation!

[TAWW]

WOW what a difference. Congratulations on the post processing well worth the effort.

[peeperita]

thanks for looking at my processing, everyone....i admit to going a little over the top with this one, but as you saw....i had nowhere to go but up....i ended up using this thought line to repair a number of my not so hot shots from that day....

Originally Posted by FocalFrenzy

Very impressive, Peep. I agree that this would look amazing on black velvet, (I've had 2 Black Velvet and Cokes, and it still looks amazing! LOL). Do you, or any of the "Post-Processing" geniuses at DPS, know how to acheive this using GIMP?

i am almost positive that you can use the gimp to do everything i did here....of course, many of the names change for the different fuctions between the two programs and hopefully someone who uses gimp could step up and help.....

thanks again, all....

peeper

[BulldogMom]

peeperita, that's awesome!

I see I have a long way to go on my photoshopping skills.

[Shutterbugdeb]

Awesome pp. It looks like you were right there in the jungle with him. Wonderful!

[prince]

I like the blury foreground leaves and the sharp jaguar.. nice warm colors..