Topic: Richard deLuca's Cat

[curvemeister]

This is one of the few remaining pictures of Richard's cat, which sadly has died.  Can you improve this image well enough to serve as a 4x6 print?  Your efforts will be appreciated.

Please explain what you did, so that others can learn.

Mike

[ianbowie]

Worked in RGB.

Found shadow in top of the ear and the highlight on the lower part of the white patch.

Found an overall blue cast (perhaps the fur has a slight blue cast but I believed too much .

Reduced Blue within white patch while leaving blue in eyes.

Checked that fur was not washed out.

Ianbowie

[Teffy]

I tried all color spaces, but liked the HSB best.  I just pulled the S and B curves up a bit.  I ran the cursor around the fur while watching the hue clock and didn't see any unwanted cast.

My condolences to Richard!

[ianbowie]

After using Curvemeister, I decided to tidy up the image (I am not the best tidier!)  and put it in a frame.

I realise that this is not strickly curves but hopefully Richard will like it.

The oval frame works very well with this image.  Do you have a full size version? - Mike

[Greg Groess]

Used Lab,
Did thresholding on the image to improve contrast, adjusted the saturation, added a slight s-curve with a small lizard tail at the very bottom.

I then created a new layer and used overlay to paint the dodge onto the cats face, ears, tail and feet.  Clearned up the image using the clone stamp to fill in the floor chips, used unsharp tool to sharpen the image, 2 pixels at 20% and then added noise to cover my tracks.

Greg

[Barry Pettinger]

Here is my try. I ended up having a different floor colour than the others

   Cloned our floor spots and other cat.
   In curvemeister,  Shadow on right foot, highlight on chest, neutral on gray by right ear., moved yellow on B in slightly from corner.
    Sharpened eyes only
    Denoised


          Barry

[ianbowie]

Mike,

Re the frame.

I enlarged the photo as the frame needs a fairly large picture so that the edges are not jaggy using a technique in Photoshop CS that does not lose quality when enlarged. (Basically increase size in 10% intervals!)

The frame - background are one of the actions that I have picked up and allows for tailoring of the border as well as the background.

Happy to send out the action to anyone that wants it. (I am not the author but it was given out freely).

I have a fairly large image at high resolution that I can send to you if you wish. Please let me know when and which email address.

Regards

Ian

[curvemeister]

Hi Ian,

Not many people know it, but each of you has a small gallery of up to 2 megs of image space.  You can access the gallery by clicking on the "Go to Gallery" tab at the top of this window, then click on the "upload image" tab and follow the instructions.  If you want to post it there, you're more than welcome.  Or email it to mike@curvemeister.com and I'll give it a home in the gallery.

BTW I must say I'm impressed by the enthusiasm for this particular image, and the quality of the results. Kudos everyone!

Mike

[Richard]

I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has participated in improving the few photos I have of my friend, Yum Yum.  I know we are given nothing forever, but she died much too young.  I still can't shake the melancholy.  As Mrs. Jackson (owner of Barbaro) said the other day, "Certainly, grief is the price we pay for love."

Because of all of you, I now at least have an image good enough for a small print.  If any of you are fortunate enough to be sharing your lives with some magnificent animal of your own, give them an extra hug for me today, okay?

A special thanks to Mike Russell for your kindnesses!

[Richard]

PS:  If any of you want to share your work on my image directly, my email addy is odyssey@stny.rr.com

Thank you so much!
Richard DeLuca

[curvemeister]

Here's Andy Hall's version of the image.  I must say this is remarkably free of jaggies compared to the original.  I converted it to jpg so that it would upload.  I'll keep Andy's original tif file on hand for a few weeks, available on request. - Mike

His description follows:
I took a shot at it.  I got rid of some of the background noise and upsized to 4x6 at 360 dpi using about 6 different methods and kept the one that looked the best.  I saved it as a tif to try to keep the quality up.  I couldn't upload it, but here it is.
 
Andy ;-)

[erkkim]

I was wondering about the blue cast in the eyes and cyan cast on fur. Also red color of floor is not so familiar to me. Used lab mode, set shadow and neutral. Slight adjustemens on lightness curve, made cat a little darker. Adjusted both a an b to get rid of blue/cyan cast.

Erkki

[curvemeister]

Good point about the cyan in the fur - I hadn't noticed.  Probably OK in the eyes though. 

[BOS]

Hi,

Noise reduction in Noise ninja
Corrected colour i RGB based on fur and pupil to my liking
Contrast in HSB using contrast masks (2)
selective color correction eyes and fur
blurring floor on right side (quick mask)
increased size using bi-cubic in 7 steps to 903x1200 pixels for target resolution 200 dpi at 4x6 inch
sharpening head with focus magic
cloning away some obvious artefact's around the ear

Regards
Björn-Olof