labrador on Benone Beach

Posted By KarenFB : As comment!

Posted By HP1485 : This picture of a dog on a beach has a beautiful rimlight around the dog which has a lovely expression on his face. However, the image could be composed a little better - although I suspect it was captured in a moment. The lighting needs some adjustment and the sky is so bright it diverts the eye from the main subject. The picture also looks a little washed out. These can all be addressed using a software package such as Photoshop (PS). I have used the general tools in case your version is not the latest.

These are the steps I took:

1. First, I cropped the image to almost a square to reduce the amount of white sky.
2. Then I cloned some of the darker areas into the remaining white sky to darken it. You can do this more easily by making the image larger so that you can clone in right up to the rimlight around the dog's head.
3. To address the "washed out" look, I used the Auto Colour Adjustment tool in the Image menu in PS. That made the image more pumchy.
4. I then used the burn tool to darken any remaining light areas.

Finally, I gave the image a broad white border as I thought it looked like a snap for the album. This was done by selecting all (Ctrl [Cmd on a Mac] A) using the Edit menu, selecting Stroke/Inside, adjust the pixel size to 8, colour to white, then deselect (Ctrl D).