I used to have the most photogenic cat named Lola. Her bright eyes and dense dark fur are great for black and white photography.
Feedback welcome!
Per feedback...
1) Original
2) cropped and brightened
3) crop of first post without any other tweaking.
4) Starting point
Hi Ruth, what a wonderful image. I love the tonal range of this and the details in the fur.
The only suggestion I could make for possible improvement is perhaps to crop tighter to remove some of the negative space on right and bottom. It looks like there may be some detail in that space, so as an alternative perhaps you could recover a touch of shadow detail.
Great work!
Thanks Alan! What do you think about this?
I agree with Alan about the first version, Ruth. Very striking image with those eyes. The second version is an improvement to my eyes. However, I'd have left the tonality of the leaves more as it was in the first version, as now they distract a bit, when they're a foil, but not really a major part of the "story".
Thank you Chris! I totally agree. This process of feedback is so helpful. Sometimes it's hard to see what is right in front of us when looking at our own work!
Why don't you give us another edit then, Ruth? You can add edits to your original post, not only in this comments section. The way Fstoppers is set up, viewers can then go directly from edit to edit.
Your arrival on the forum, or recently increased activity, is refreshing. Always interested to see what you're up to next!
Thanks Chris for the welcome! And I added the suggested edits.
The second image in the main group is the best all-round for me, Ruth. I think a bit of asymmetry, with some dark at bottom right to balance the leaves at left, looks better than when the eyes are more nearly central as in the third crop.
In case you haven't done that already, if you took the image in colour, you could turn down the green channel to make the leaves darker when converting to mono, reducing the need for localised correction to darken them.
I couldn't resist my own edit! Not to diminish your own. I started with the full image without reference to your iterations.
This is beautiful! Thank you! And thank you for the tip on the green channel too. Now to see if I can get close to yours. ;)
Great edit Chris - bringing out the fur on the body provides more context and balance.
Powerful image Ruth!
Thank you both! I levelled the eyes too, hoping to max out the intensity of that gaze. Wouldn't want to be a mouse....