ANIMAL PORTRAITS
The finer details
Although our subject is largely surrounded by deep black shadows,
there are a couple of lighter areas. Rather than attempt to precisely
cut around the fur, enlarge your brush (400px) and feather the
edge of the fur with its softest sections. The soft gradient will
delicately darken the background to near black, while retaining
enough detail in the much brighter fur.
High Pass filter
The next step is to sharpen the image, which can be done using
a High Pass filter. This is selected by simply navigating towards
the top toolbar before selecting Filter>Other>High Pass. This
detects edges within your image and will apply a grey overlay
to the duplicated layer. But don’t worry, we’ll be changing the
blend mode to hide this later.
Change the blend mode
Once you’ve chosen the desired radius, you
can reveal the image by changing the blend
mode. Overlay, Soft Light and Hard Light
offer varying intensities of sharpening.
Hard Light will produce the most intense
sharpening effect and Soft Light will appear
the most subtle. We chose Overlay as a nice
middle ground between the two.
Camera Raw
Merge your duplicated ‘Background copy’ layer and ‘Black
Background’ layer together. Then head to the toolbar and select
Filter>Camera Raw Filter to bring up Photoshop’s Camera Raw
filter. You can now increase the Whites by a tiny amount (+3),
and the Highlights (+2), to add a little more punch to the fur, while
adding definition to any areas you darkened slightly during Step 7.Tack-sharp subject
Change the intensity of the filter by increasing the Radius slider.
We’d recommend keeping the radius below 2.0 pixels – we settled
on 1.8 pixels for this project. If you’re looking to sharpen a specific
area of your image, click the Add Layer Mask icon, invert the mask
(Cmd/Ctrl+I) and change the blend mode (see Step 11). You can
then use a white brush to paint the areas you want to sharpen.Crop and finish
All that’s left to do is crop your image. We
amplified the black negative space by
positioning the lemur to the left of the
image and cropped out the hand for a
cleaner composition. There you have it;
you’d be forgiven for thinking this lemur
was a patient studio sitter!9
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Expert Tip
If your camera features a button
with a key icon on it, press it while
cycling through images in playback
to protect those images from being
deleted accidentally (formatting will
still delete them). This is also a great
way to mark ‘keepers’ quickly when
you’re out and about in the field, as
the lock icon will appear in Adobe
Bridge, making it much easier to find
your favourite photographs later on
in post-production process. This is
very useful when experimenting and
taking lots of images during a
project like this.7