Ziti

Ziti is a Basenji mix the shelter told us was found in a dumpster outside an apartment complex. I'm not sure if this qualifies as a "fine picture" but it's one of my favorites of her taken with my trusty D70s. I would be lying if I said it captured her personality entirely. She likes to stand on her head, so most of her personality pictures have a better view of her tail. This is my equivalent of the school picture with the kid all dressed up and captured in that brief moment between escapades. Somehow my post processing skills have failed me on this one, I have tried making more colorful, making it black and white, making it more or less contrasty, and this is the closest thing to satisfactory I could come up with. I'm still not happy with it, but I'm out of ideas. If anyone would like to play with it, the NEF is in http://home.earthlink.net/~cevermillion/images/Ziti/

Santa brought me a D300 with a beautiful VR 18-200 lens, so I'm afraid she and the cats are going to spend their holidays hounded by paparazzi

Eyes are the windows of the soul

Her eyes speak volumes. I don't think you need to do anything to it. It totally speaks to me (of course, I am a dog lover and I can read what they say - thanks for the daily love and kibble and the warm blanket)

Colleen Vermillion said:

I'm still not happy with it, but I'm out of ideas. If anyone would like to play with it

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Shame you're not happy with this, I really like it, Ziti looks one very chilled content dog, I like the composition, the diagonal line running through the shot, she looks so calm, beautiful. Funnily enough my first dog as a child was a Basenji, predictably we called him "Senji" he was a bit of a menace with livestock though, all the time we had him (13 years) he never could be trained away from chasing sheep, and could never be allowed to run free in the fields or he would chase anything and everything! but he was great with the family. There is definately a look of Basenji in Ziti I see it mostly around her forehead and eyes, does she have the curly tail and does she bark or not?

Colleen Vermillion said:

I'm still not happy with it, but I'm out of ideas.

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Colleen, I suppose it it the rather flat lighting that prevents it from gaining a more 3D look. You might want to try some more tonemapping, e.g. with the photoshop sharpening action that Nicolas Claris posted here on OPF.

Have fun chasing the animals, and try some off-camera lighting. The light determines the mood, and it modulates shape.

Bart

Bart_van_der_Wolf said:

You might want to try some more tonemapping, e.g. with the photoshop sharpening action that Nicolas Claris posted here on OPF.

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Like his ?

Nic - I liked this before, but what a difference, looks great now!

Hi Colleen,

As usual, I've not been very precise, but maybe you approve of the changes in composition. I guess you can pick out what they are. I have left it to you to sort out the colours.

Brown dogs are easy. ;-)




Best wishes,

Ray

Nicolas Claris said:

Like his ?

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Yes, much better (hope Colleen agrees), given the image as it was.

Bart

janet Smith said:

There is definately a look of Basenji in Ziti I see it mostly around her forehead and eyes, does she have the curly tail and does she bark or not?

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She does bark, but she has all the loose skin Basenjis typically have, and she grooms like a cat sometimes. The shelter thinks she has Staffordshire bull terrier in her, and they might be right... she does have a little under bite that makes her look as stubborn as she is sometimes and she's amazingly strong for her size. She's a very athletic, gregarious, joyful, high maintenance (in the sense that she needs lots of our undivided attention) little dog.

I do like the picture a lot, which is probably why I'm disappointed with what I'm doing with it. It was taken back in the spring and I keep pulling it out and fooling with it, which might be part of the problem.

Nicolas - I love the tone mapping. I was struggling with how to keep her dark eyes without making them look like pits.

Ray - I love what you did with the foreground. I'll have to think about what to do with the background. I like how the black cleans up the image, but I think I'd like some sort of subtle texture back there. Maybe I'll sample the dark leather couch she was on and try that.

Thanks for the nudge in the right direction. Sometimes you get stuck thinking a certain way about an image and it helps to have someone else's perspective.

-Colleen

Colleen Vermillion said:

Nicolas - I love the tone mapping. I was struggling with how to keep her dark eyes without making them look like pits.

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Bonjour Colleen
(My very first English teacher name was Colleen… I just wonder if she was not Colline?)

Well, anyway, I'm glad you liked the tone mapping.

I used my sharpening action on the whole "beast" (action is downloadble for OPF members here:
http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showpost.php?p=39656&postcount=64

For your dog, I dissabled the last part of the script (curves) and, if I remember well, did set the blending to 30%

Then:
flattened the file
selected the eyes with the lasso, made a contour of 10 pix
copy/paste to make a new layer
applied 15% of saturation
filter accentuation about 30/30/0
Curve to open-up 3/4 tones
flattened the file
export for the web

and voilà…
Oh, I forgot, I did desaturate the blanket from its blue cast…

Longer to write down than to do it…


Bark, bark!