Don’t Take My Picture!!!

This unhappy Jaguar was stomping around his terrain at the Jacksonville Zoo when I creeped up on him to get his image – he was not at all happy about it – I guess he thought I was the paparazzi. Such a beautiful cat with such a humongous roar! Anyway I got his photo in spite of his attitude and luckily he was behind a fence. Used the technique from my How to Get Rid of Those Darn Fences in Zoo Shots blog. In Lightroom I just used settings that worked, then into PS and the Topaz (see sidebar for website link) AI Clear to sharpen it up a bit more (settings: Remove Noise – Auto and Enhance Sharpness Low – Exposure -0.12 and Clarity 0.19). Actually used the Shadows and Highlights Command to pop the eyes a bit (see my The Eyes Have It – How to Make them Pop in an Image blog). Then used some Darken and Lighten Curves Adjustments Layers. The texture was an old free basic one from Jai Johnson called coffee wall, and then a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer was used to fine tune the background color. That meant I needed to select the Jaguar to put him on the nicer background and it took a while – those whiskers were a problem and eventually they had to be painted back in by hand. A Color Lookup Adjustment Layer was added using the Candlelight preset set to 56% layer opacity. Now just some clean up was done. This guy took several hours to really catch his personality. Wow what a cat!!!…..Digital Lady Syd