Here is the photo as submitted on our Facebook page:

Tips for taking this type of photo:

 I had a hard time with this photo because it must have been taken at a very low quality setting on the camera. So, there was a lot of digital noise that degraded the photo. Also, since the dog was laying on a blanket with a very bright color, a lot of the red was reflected back onto the dog which made his fur look odd. I would recommend using at least the medium quality setting on the camera and using a neutral color blanket.

Tips for editing the photo in Photoshop:

I had a hard time getting the noise out of this photo even using the most advanced techniques. So, I decided not to give it more of a graphic image feel so I could get away with smoothing out the colors.

I started by making a duplicate layer copy then using the “Cartooned” filter in the Clean set of filters by Topaz Labs. I played with sliders so I had some crisp edges.

I reduced the opacity of the cartooned layer to 75% to bring back a little of the detail from the original photo.

Then I used the clone stamp tool to get rid of the black thing behind the couch and the healing brush to clean up the hair on the blanket.

I then bumped up the vibrance and saturation both 16% to give it a little punch.

There was too much red being reflected onto the dog from the blanket so I added a selective color adjustment layer and in the reds category I changed the values as follows – Cyan  +8, Magenta -15, Yellow -3, black +21.

Here’s what I ended up with:

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Tonya says, “This is Peanut! My adoption day failure. I volunteer at our no kill shelter and I signed up to help at Petsmart. I knew I was in trouble when this one walked in. I made it safely from the parking lot to the stoplight about 100 feet before turning around and adopting her. She is a great little dog and gives good hugs:)”

Here is the photo as submitted on our Facebook page.

 Here is the photo after some Photoshop fixing:  

Tips on taking this type of photo:

• When you are taking photos indoors with minimal lighting, your photos are most likely going to be dark. If you pull out your camera’s manual, you should find a topic on how to change the ISO. This is a setting that changes the camera’s image sensors sensitivity to light. The higher the number, the more light the sensor will let in. So, when you are indoors in low light, crank this setting up as high as it will go. There is a downfall to doing this though… You will have more “noise” in your photos. This means that they won’t be as clear as they would be at a lower ISO setting.
• Turn all of the lights on in the room and open the curtains. You want to make the room as bright as possible so that the camera doesn’t need to compensate as much. the more light you have around your subject, the better the overall quality of the photo will be.

Editing tips for beginners:

• If you have a basic photo editing program, just increase the exposure, brightness quite a bit then bump up the saturation a little.

Editing tips for advanced photographers:

• In Photoshop, I used the Topaz Labs Adjust 4 filter. I first used the Exposure Correction filter and increased the exposure a little more than the default value. then I ran the filter again using the Photo Pop setting and played with the sliders a little.
• Then I cleaned up the background by using the clone stamp tool. I sampled some of the clean areas of the carpet and cloned them over the areas that were cluttered.
• The photo was still looking a little dark so I added a Curves adjustment layer and increased the exposure. This made the dog look too bright, so I added a  layer mask to bring back the darker image from the layer below for just the dog.
• Then I sharpened the image up by using the Topaz Labs Detail filter. I used the Bold Detail filter but reduced the strength a little.
• The photo was still looking a little drab so I added a quick vibrance adjustment layer to bump up the color.

If you have a photo that you want fixed, please visit our Photo Correction Services page for details. You can also enter our Fix Your Photo Facebook First Friday contest on the first Friday of each month. Click here for details.

Here is the before:

Here is the after:

Tips on taking this type of photo:

This is a great photo to start with. It looks like MaryAnn took this photo in the shade with a light source in front of the dog which produced a nice catch light in his eyes. She zoomed in real close and cropped the photo in a manner that really keeps the viewer’s interest. The only thing that I did to this photo was to make the colors pop and I brought out some detail in the fur. To do this in your camera, you can try to use your Landscape setting. This setting will tell the camera to increase the saturation of the colors and sharpen the photo a little. You will only want to use this setting if your subject is able to sit real still because depending on how sunny it is outside, it may need to use a slower shutter speed. This means that if there is even the slightest amount of movement by you or the dog, the photo will look blurry.

Tips on editing this type of photo:

If you have a basic photo editing program, just increase the contrast, saturation and sharpness a little bit.

If you are an advanced photographer, read on…

I used the Adjust 4 plugin from Topaz Labs for Photoshop, which I just LOVE. There are many different adjustment presets available. I ran three different ones to get the amount of detail and color pop that I liked – Exposure Correction, Mild Colop Pop then Photo Pop. Then I used the dodge and burn tools to bring out the dark and light areas of his eyes.

Don’t forget to submit your photo next Friday by posting it on our Facebook page. Click here for details.

“She is around 8-9ish. We “fostered” her for about 3 days before we knew she was ours. She was going to be put down in the shelter because she was so scared of people. That was 4 years ago now and she LOVES being around people! She was diagnosed with lymphosarcoma last Oct and just finished her chemo…. She is in remission and will hopefully be around for a long time to come!   I managed to luck out when taking this pic and got a great pic of her tounge!”

Here is the photo as submitted on our Facebook page:

Here is the photo after a quick fix-up in Photoshop:

Tips on how to take a photo like this:

Overall, I think Susan did a real nice job. The composition of the photo is great! I love the way that it is cropped so that the dog is coming diagonally out of the corner and the wood planks are coming toward the viewer. I’m not sure if she did this intentionally or not… but it adds a lot of interest to the photo (so does that crazy tongue!).  It is pretty sharply focused, so she must have had her camera at the correct settings. As mentioned in last weeks winning entry post, the best basic setting to use with a point and shoot camera would be either the “Kids and Pets” or “Sports” setting because they automatically set all of the technical stuff in your camera to take a photo of a fast moving subject.

The problem with taking photos in the bright sunlight is that you are going to get a lot of harsh shadows and bright highlights. So, you will lose detail in both the darkest and lightest areas of the photo. See how the white fur on her face and her left eye have almost no detail in them? This could be avoided by taking the photo in a shady area but that’s not always possible. One little trick you can use is to turn on the flash on your camera. Read your camera’s manual to see if you have a “fill flash” setting. This will reduce the amount of flash coming from the camera to just enough to fill in the dark shadows so you have detail in them. It’s not going to help you with the bright highlights though. Another option is to block the sun on your subject with your own shadow, someone else’s shadow or with an object like an unbrella.

For the semi-pros out there:

 I would use your spot metering mode to focus your exposure on just the dog. Lock your exposure reading in on the brightest part of the dog’s fur that is being hit by the sun. This will ensure that you don’t blow out your highlights. You can always lift the dark shadows during post-processing but it’s real hard to get back the detail in blown out highlights. Here are the steps I took in Photoshop to adjust this photo:

I made a duplicate layer copy and then used a filter in the Adjust 4 series by Topaz Labs called Portrait Drama which opened up the shadows, calmed down the highlights and brought out a great deal of detail in the fur. The default settings were lacking a bit of color for my taste. So, I bumped up the saturation slider a bit to give it a little pop.

 Then once I applied that adjustment and was back in Photoshop, I used a Kubota action called Digital Fill Flash (which is really just a curves adjustment layer that brightens up the entire photo and then adds a layer mask that is filled with black). I then painted with white in the layer mask to brighten up the dark shadows a little more. This basically does what using a fill-flash on your camera would do:

Don’t forget to visit our Facebook Page this Friday to enter your photo in the contest to win a free makeover. Or take a look at our photo correction services page for details on how to get your photos fixed.

~Susan

Here is the original photo as submitted on our Facebook page:

Barney’s photo won because it has a good overall composition and the exposure is pretty even and the scenery is very attractive . Even though the lighting is pretty “even”, it is evenly over-exposed. When a photo is over-exposed (too light), the white portions of fur will lose all of their detail and it is hard to totally get it back. So, in this photo, we have a case of “blown out highlights” and washed out colors.

Here are a few tips on how to take a photo of a dog when you are outdoors in the sunlight:

• Try to place the dog in an area that is totally shaded. Bright sun will cause a loss of detail in the light fur and only partial shade on the dog will make everything look uneven.
• Try taking photos in the early morning or late afternoon when the sun is lower in the sky and is not so harsh.
• Since you are in the shade, you will have less light coming into your camera which will cause another set of problems. Your camera needs light to freeze movement. If you have low light and fast moving dogs, you get dark and blurry pictures. To avoid these problems, you will need to change a few settings on your camera to allow more light to come into it. These settings will be different depending on the type and quality of camera that you have.
• For simple point and shoot type cameras, you probably have a “kids and pets” setting. If not, look for a “sports” setting instead. When your camera is on one of these settings, it knows that whatever you are pointing at is going to be moving around like a maniac. So, it will know that it needs to automatically adjust some other technical settings to let more ambient light into the camera than normal so that it can use a fast shutter speed to produce a sharply focused photo.
• For advanced photographers with high end cameras, I would suggest the following settings. Set your ISO to 400 (any higher will produce a lot of digital noise). Use your Aperture Priority setting at around F5.6 (If you go any wider, you are going to have a very shallow depth of field and will lose detail on the fur. If you are doing a close-up and the dog has a long nose, you will lose focus on either the nose or the eyes at wide apertures). 

After you get the photo out of the camera, you are probably going to want to do some clean-up to it. If you have a real basic photo editing software program, you would want to lower the brightness, increase the contrast, saturation and sharpness on this photo.

Advanced users may want to follow these steps in Photoshop:

I mainly use filters from Topaz Labs for my photo editing. They have  several sets of filters that specialize in different things. Now that I have them, I can’t live without them. I use at least one filter on every single photo that I edit. You can give them all a 30 day test drive for yourself by clicking here.

After opening the photo in Photoshop, I ran the Topaz Labs Adjust 4 filter and chose the ”Recovery-Highlight” option to try to recover some of the lost detail. I did manage to get a lot back but the whites are still blown out. Usually when this happens, I take the route of giving the photo a more “painterly feel” by increasing the contrast and saturation to offset the less interesting, damaged parts of the photo.  I was able to do this within the Topaz filter by playing with the sliders to make a few slight adjustments to the default settings. This is what I got with about 60 seconds of playing around:

That made quite an improvement but it left it looking a little rough still. So, I ran another Topaz Labs filter in their “Clean” series which brought out a little more detail and defined the edges and fur a little more. After that filter was done processing, I bumped up the blacks a little and added a Vibrance adjustment layer at a value of +20.

The end results are not very photo-realistic but it makes for a much more interesting and attractive photo that will hopefully catch the eye of prospective adoptive families.

Don’t forget to submit your photo next Friday in our Facebook contest. Click here for details. Or just send us your photos directly and we will get back to you with a quote to fix them up for you. Click here for details on our photo adjustment services.

From now on, winners will be randomly drawn. I suppose it doesn’t make much sense to pick winners based on good photo quality if the point of this contest is to fix the photo!

“Fix Your Photo Facebook Fridays!”

Here’s the deal…

1. Become our friend on Facebook by clicking here.
2. On Friday (and only on Fridays or else you will be banned from the contest for all eternity… kidding, but you will be disqualified for that week), make a wall post on our page with your dog’s name and a little info about him or her. Then attach your best photo of them.
3. On or before Tuesday of the following week, the winner of each week’s contest will be announced. Winners will randomly chosen. We will pick a number from a hat. If your entry was that number for the day, you win.
4. The winner will receive a FREE makeover of the submitted photo (average $20.00 value).
5. We will post the before and after versions here on our blog along with helpful tips on how it is best to capture the type of image depicted in the winning entry and how to do some simple Photoshop editing to make it really pop!

You can find out more about our photo correction services by clicking here.

Here is an example of a before and after shot (of my maniac dogs Blingo and Misty)…

Before photo with poor exposure, color balance and composition:

After photo with some Photoshop magic:

We are looking forward to seeing all of your photos. Best of luck in the contest!

 Perhaps you also know that they produce wall graphics of fun kid’s stuff like super heroes, cartoons and Disney characters. Here is an example of fairies in a little girl’s room:

What you probably don’t know is that they also do custom wall graphics that you can create from your own photos. Here is an example of some clings that I had made for the playroom wall at Zippity Do Dogs in Phoenix.

One thing to note is that to get a photo blown up this big, it needs to be a really sharply focused, high resolution image. If you are not a professional photographer, you can definitely accomplish this if you have a nice camera that has a bare minimum of 6 mega pixels and you take the photo outdoors where there is plenty of natural light to allow you to use a fast shutter speed (try using your “Sports” or “Kids and Pets” mode since they automatically set your camera to a fast shutter speed which will make the image sharper). Or you can just book the time and talent of your friendly local photographer (A Dog’s Life Photo can hook you up!).

If you happen to be a professional photographer, you’re in luck because Fathead just announced a new program for professional photographers. By joining the program, you will receive 25% off all of your custom orders. The program is real new and they don’t have a sign-up form on their website yet. So, just head on over to Fathead.com to check it out and then send an email to KatieBenages@Fathead.com letting her know that you want to join the program. Be sure to give her a link to your website so she can confirm that you are a pro.

In the past two years, I have had not one, not two, not three…. but FOUR (4), yes four external backup hard drives crash on me.  Each one set me back at least one Ben Franklin. Worse yet, I was dumb enough to have some very important files (like client photos and “before” photos of the house that my husband has spent the past three years transforming into a fine piece of art) on them that I had already erased from my main computer. So, really, I needed to have a backup drive for my backup drive… which I did not do.

One drive broke because I tripped on the cord it it came crashing down from my desk. Another one just simply slid off the printer that I had it resting on top of that was sitting on my floor (so it was only like a 10 inch fall but it was enough to kill the thing). The other two just suddenly stopped working for no apparent reason.

I heard that there was a trick to get the data off the drive by deep freezing it. Supposedly, when all of the tiny parts inside of it are frozen solid, you have a small window of time to plug it in to your computer to grab the data before things thaw out out and start grinding together again. I don’t know. It sounds kinda wacky to me. But none the less… I have had two big hunks of metal sitting in my freezer for over a month now in hopes that this silly plan works. If not, I need to ship them off to a “safe lab” where people walk around in those big white astronaut looking suits with gloves and face masks to have them try to recover the data. And get this… it may cost up to $1500.00 for each hard drive!!!!! I can get a brand new computer for that much. Uuuugh.

I have always been very hesitant to use an online backup source because I have been concerned about the security of my files. There’s something unnerving about my private documents and my original, copyrighted photo files that I have worked so hard on floating around in cyberspace for anyone to get their hands on. Well, some friends assured me that this type of backup is safe because they have all of this fancy-schmancy encrypting of files that they do so nobody can actually view your documents unless they are logged into your account. So, I reluctantly started doing some research on them.

I checked out places like Mozy, Sugar Spice and the service available through my Norton Anti-Virus software. These services all base their costs on the amount of files that you store on them. for example, Sugar Sync is $10.00 a month for a total of 60 GB of space.  For the average computer user, that is waaaay more space then they would ever need. For people like me and the other photographers out there that I know, we would eat that up in a few months. I fill up a 4 GB compact flash in each photo session and never take the time to actually delete the files that I don’t use.

After much research, I decided upon a service from Carbonite. It’s $54.95/year for unlimited storage. Period. You can store as much as you want… for 55 bucks. Period.

These is a downside, of coarse. The initial backup of your files takes FOREVER! The backup works in the background while your computer is idle so it doesn’t slow down your computer. I am always on my computer so maybe that was the source of the problem. But I even left town for a 3 day weekend and left my computer on the whole time in hopes that it would catch up on my files. It was still only 75% complete when I came home.  Geeez!

It took about 4 weeks before the initial backup was complete. But since then, this service has knocked my socks off! My documents are saved within minutes after I create them. If my computer crashes, all I have to do is log into my account with them from another computer and I have access to all of my files!! I can even share all of my documents between my laptop and my desktop now without having to burn things onto a disc or save them on a flash drive to transfer them over. Now that I have someone helping me out with photo editing, I can give her access to my Carbonite account and she can work on my files from her own home. What more can you ask for!

It’s not often that I plug a product. I am really not a sales person. I will honestly tell you that I do get something out of it if you use this link to sign up with them. You would too if you referred people to use them. For every friend that you refer that buys a subscription, you get 3 months of the service for free!  So, if you do end up signing up and you heard about it first from me, please help me save my precious files and use this link to sign up with them.

If I had to summarize Carbonite it three words it would simply be… peace  of  mind.  Ahhhhhhh.

To add bubbles to the photo, you first need to create a bubble brush in Photoshop. I did this by visiting Big Stock Photo and searching for “bubbles” to find a photo of some bubbles isolated on a white background. I found the perfect photo. If you want to use this one yourself, head on over to their website and grab it. The file number is listed on the photo below. When you purchase your photo, there will be no watermarks on the image.

Open the photo in Photoshop. Duplicate your background layer. Grab your magic wand brush with a tolerance of 3 and click on the white background on the top layer to select it. If you are using this photo, that one click should give you a pretty clean selection. Once you have all of the background selected and none of the bubbles, invert your selection by clicking Select/Inverse.

Now that you have just the bubbles selected, we are going to create a brush with them so we can paint them into out photo. Hit Edit/Define Brush Preset and a Brush Name box will appear. Name your brush whatever you want to.

Go back to your photo of the cute baby in the tub and create a new blank layer. Then double-click on the layer to rename it so you know that this is your bubbles layer.

Now select your brush tool and then open up your brushes pallate. Click on the Brush Tip Shape section and slide the spacing slider to right so that the bubbles start to, well… get spaced out. Then click on Shape Dynamics and increase size, angle and roundness jitter to around 25% each. Click on the Scatter secion and increase the Jitter to about 150%.

Make sure that you save this new brush as indicated below:

Now you are going to want to choose a color for your bubbles. I like to give mine a blue/purple tint to start with. Don’t get too hung up on which color you choose right now because we will be making some adjustments later. Double-click on your foreground color to bring up the color picker box. I have the “only web colors” box checked to simplify my selections. I first selected the brightest blue from the vvertical bar with the rainbow of colors. Then I selected the top-right color choice.

Now comes the fun part! With your brush at 100% opacity, start tapping and dragging your Wacom pen slightly upward in different areas to create bubbles floating around. Put some in front of the tub and have some floating out of the tub. Vary your brush size and stroke pressure with each stroke.  If you don’t like the way that the bubbles look after each stroke, just hit Control-Z to get rid of them. Dont go to crazy with them at this point. You are going to add a few more layers of bubbles yet. This is just your base layer with the most predominent bubbles. Here is how my first layer looks:

Create another new layer and rename it Bubbles 2. Click on your foreground color again and this time, pick the next lighter color over to the left.

Add just a few more bubbles on this layer. Then create another new layer, pick the next lighter color and add a few more bubbles. Repeat this until you have added a few bubbles at each of the colors on the top row of the color picker (except the pure white). You should now have 6 layers of bubbles and it should look something like below:

You can leave things just as they are now or if you want to jazz things up a bit and add a little life to the bubbles, you can select each layer individually and on each one, hit Image/Adjustments/Hue Saturation. Play with both the hue and saturation sliders until you get each layer as you like it. On the 1st bubble layer, I reduced the saturation quite a bit and I varied the hue on the rest of the layers. You can also lower the opacity of any of the layers if you feel that they are too strong.

Here’s how mine ended up in the end. Please feel free to share your bubble creations with me by sending them to susan@adogslifephoto.com. I would be happpy to add them to this post with a link to your website.

 Equipment used:

Adobe Photoshop CS4,  Wacom Intuos4 Medium Pen Tablet

This pretty litle Bolgnese’s name is Brie. It was pretty hot in my Phoenix studio the day she came to visit and she was panting a lot. To get her tongue to stay in her mouth, her mom gave her a hot-dog treat. That did the trick of retracting her tongue but now we were left with a hot dog sticking out of her mouth. Although I think it’s cute, her mom preferred that we remove it from the photo along with the red staining on her white fur.

Let’s start by cleaning up the background to make it a solid black because the light spill is really bugging me. To do this, grab the Magic Wand tool with a tolerance of 10 to select different areas of the background until almost all of the blinking areas (meaning that they have not been selected) are selected.  Then click Select/Modify/Feather and enter a Feather Radius of 3 pixels. This will soften the edge of the selection just enough so that the division between the fur and the background looks pretty natural.

Then fill in your selection with black by clicking Edit/Fill then choose Black. To blend the edges of the fur into the background even more, select the burn tool at about 10% exposure and brush over the areas that you think need to blend better.

To remove the red in the fur, create a new Selective Color Adjustment layer by clicking on the half black/half white circle in the bottom of the layers panel.

In the Reds category, bring the Magenta & Yellow down to -100. (Note this will be different for every dog. Just play with the color adjustments until the reds are almost gone and the rest of the fur color is not affected).

A layer mask will automatically be created within the adjustment layer. Since you only want the red areas to be changed by this adjustment layer, you can click on the layer mask and then hit Ctrl-I to invert the color of the layer mask from white to black. This will make your adjustments temporarily disappear.

You will then want to paint back in your adjustments to only the red fur areas by selecting a soft edge brush with your foreground color set to white.

Now that the staining is gone in the fur, all we have left to do is to remove the cookie. To do this, flatten the image then click on the lasso tool and draw a selection around the other half of the dog’s mouth. Click Select/Modify/Feather and your feather selection of 3 pixels should be defaulted into the dialog box. Click OK then Control-J to duplicate the selection of the mouth into a new layer. Click Edit/Transform/Flip Horizontal to flip the half mouth selection and then move it over to cover the half of the mouth with the cookie.

Flatten the image then use the healing brush to blend the newly pasted mouth side in with the original photo and Voila!… you’re done.

Feel free to shoot me a message is you would like a copy of the “before” file if you would like to try this tutorial out on your own.