I’ve gone wild with Photoshop…

For a number of years I’ve found that my photos tended to be opened in Photoshop for only simple edits, a bit of sharpening, contrast, levels all applied globally. However I have also been building my skills with photoshop to enable me to turn photos from the camera in to the images I want.

I’m really fortunate to have a good set of photoshop guru’s and just recently I took Glyn Dewis’ mastering selections workshop to further build and improve my skills. I then decided to apply the learning to a tip I picked up from Calvin Hollywood for making black and white conversions in Photoshop.

Taking the wolf image from colour to monochrome was simple as I had created an action to build the layers needed for Calvin’s monochrome technique. Then a range of adjustments left me realising I needed to treat the wolf and the background differently in the monochrome conversion to make the wolf stand out more from his background. So I had two layers of monochrome wolf, one with the intended wolf conversion and one with the intended background conversion. All I needed was to make a selection and mask the wolf from the background.

Wolf image as originally shot in colour

Wolf image converted to monochrome for the wolf

Wolf image converted to monochrome for the background

Making the selection

Using several techniques acquired from Glyn’s workshop and one you can find on his youtube channel I set about the task.

I made an initial selection of the wolf with  the quick select tool, then used refine edge to refine the edge.

I first worked with the radius in the Edge Detection section of the Refine Edge dialog box. Once that looked reasonable (better than my original) I then used the refine radius tool brush to further find the edges of the wolf’s fur. While the tutorials often are related to cutting models and products from clean backgrounds my aim was to go and get the wolf out of the more difficult similar toned grassy background.

With some efforts and the inner glow tip from Glyn’s video I was done and the wolf was selected and the background darkened due to the different mono conversion.

Here’s my final image…

Wolf and some Photoshop gone wild

Click on the wolf for a larger view.

This is quite different from my normal posts and I’m keen to hear if this kind of article is interesting for my readers, let me know in the comments below?