My dog, before and after Photoshop

[mountaindew]

I wanted to post these pictures and see what you think of these. I was playing around the photoshop on my dog, tried to make it look nicer. My wife absolutely loves it. Wanted to ask you people what I can do to improve it.

Before...the original shot..

After photoshop.

Be honest. I'm willing to take any critic on it. It's the only way to learn to get better.

[mmeyer]

I'm a little scared f your dog. I like the selective colored one the best. It is really nice. Maybe a little sharpening of the eyes would be good. It would be nicer if you could post them a little smaller so we could see the whole picture without having to scroll.

Thanks for sharing

Mike

[mountaindew]

Whoops. My bad. Ok I resized it. Thanks for the tip. Will do

[mmeyer]

Much better size but I'm still a little scared. Can you photoshop a little smile or something. He/She keeps staring at me!

[Fish Toys]

Take one more picture and your history! I sure like it. The color in the eyes are questionable tho?

[Steve Foss]

I like them both, but the second one best by a good margin. The blues look pretty intense in pic No. 2, but that's an individual decision made by each photographer, and the second image is in the category of photo art, anyway. Lots more so-called artistic license is the norm for photo art.

Could also just be how Marc's monitor is calibrated.

[mountaindew]

I set the 2nd picture on black and white, and the only color is the dog's eyes. Also increased the saturation to make it more blue. Was just playing it around to see what it looked like. To me..it's kinda boring..but to my wife, she flat out fell in love with it.

Which got me to thinking that it's all depends on their personal photos, for example, if I was going to take a shot of your kid outside in the fall colors with a red balloon, I'd set in monochrome and the leaves and the red balloon would be the only colors on it. To a stranger looking at it..it wouldn't be a big deal, but if it's your kid, you'd think it's the most beautiful thing you'd ever seen. You follow what I'm saying?

So that would be a useful tool to use that for your customer's personal photos that you can modify it to the customer's taste. You know?

[Steve Foss]

Marc, you are on the money.

It's amazing the number of times my mate has been looking over my shoulder as I'm sorting a day's shoot and when I was about to go on to another image has smacked me with an elbow and said: "Hey, dummy, don't bypass that one, process it. It's better than all the rest!"

Nine times out of 10 she's right in the sense that it's HER pick that sells the best, not mine. I've started to develop two parallel lines of imagery now: Images that I take to please myself and images to sell to customers. Sometimes they are one and the same, but they're different often enough. It's now had an impact on my shooting style when I'm out capturing nature photos, too. First I work on what inspires me. Then I ask, hmmm, would a different message sell better?

Same deal when I'm shooting weddings/portraits/commercial work. No matter how much you talk with the client up front, there are going to be differences in how each sees the final product, so it's good to get lots of different looks.

Well known fact that most consumers and lovers of pictures look for different things and see things differently than photographers.

I encourage any photographer to bring the non-photographer significant other over to the monitor any time there's a question and take their answer to heart.