Here, kitty kitty...

[foxor]

When I was in Turkey in the summertime I took this picture, and I loved it except for the fact that the cat was in the shade, which made the colour of the cat relative its surroundings not that amazing. Smart cat, seeing as it was 42 degrees celsius out that day. I did some tweaking, and here's the result.

Before:


After:


I don't remember the exact process (I tweaked it a LOT, and got carried away with just experimenting)...and I'm sure there would have been a more direct way to get this result, but here's an approximation of what I did:
-duplicate background layer, and very carefully (it was worth it, I think) selected the cat using the lasso tool...feathered this selection very slightly and created a separate cat only layer (I ended up hiding this layer at the end, but it was convenient to have the layer with my selection there just in case I wanted it again)
-on the background duplicate I darkened the area minus the cat considerably and decreased contrast and brightness
-created a second background duplicate, changed blending mode to screen
-created third background duplicate and applied gaussian blur, changed blending mode to soft light
-created a new background duplicate (number 4, can you tell I was experimenting?) and after selecting all pixels on the cat only layer, deleted the cat from this fourth background duplicate; on this layer I applied a few filters to very small degrees; gaussian blur and fresco (I'm pretty sure) are the most prominent and then changed the blending mode to luminosity; on this layer I also used a soft brush to erase part of the granite that the cat is standing on to restore detail here
-I created a new layer at the top of the stack, and using the paintbrush I hand drew some whiskers back in where my selection job was poor

[Pshorten]

Wow, you did an amazing job with this.

[kimmeraz]

Wow, that was a lot of work! Thanks for sharing, it gave me some ideas for a photo that I'm having trouble adjusting!

[B..]

Awesome post processing! I wish I could do as well as that!

How about a little bit of cropping? I like all the textures around the cat. Maybe crop off the grey area to the very left of the shot, and maybe crop off the dark window (which I find jarring and disruptive) on the upper right edge of the shot. And crop top/bottom to make the proportions look pleasing.


B

[foxor]

Thanks for the feedback! I think I will play with the cropping, now that you mention it. I want to keep much of the background, because that's part of what makes the picture special in my opinion, but you're right that that one dark spot is distracting. We'll see what I can do!