Sometimes you can turn your failures into winners with just a little thought and a bit of software of course. Just as we were framing up for a great portrait of this Maine Coon cat it looked up.

Fortunately the image came out sharp, so all was not lost. The idea is to introduce a computer mouse into the top of the picture so that the cat appears to be looking at it.

Step 1. It is always a good idea with any image to call up the levels palette within Photoshop for some adjustment as we did in project 2. Sometimes these changes can have a remarkable effect on your pictures. The levels palette is found via the image-adjust menu or you can use the shortcut keys Ctrl+L. Often the auto button on the layers palette is worth a try as it can give excellent results, but with our cat select the eye dropper tool situated bottom right of the palette.

Look for the lightest part of your image that retains detail and touch down on that spot with your mouse. We chose the white area just below and left of the cats nose. If you get the selection point right you will see quite a change in your image, if you get it wrong hold the Alt key down and the cancel button will change to reset allowing you to make another selection.

_______________________________

Step 2. This cat has some gorgeous colours, but our image from a digital camera has lost just a little of the richness. We also have some high lights in the background that need toning down. You can put back some colour saturation by calling up the hue and saturation palette from image adjust menu or via the shortcut key Ctrl+U. Add about +32 saturation by moving the slider to the right.

To deal with the high lights select the burn tool from menu bar and make your exposure setting no more than 10. Choose a large soft edged brush and darken the light areas carefully.

Tip. If your brush size isn't shown on screen as a ring, go into preferences then display and cursors and change your painting cursor to brush size. Tip. You can use your keyboard to scroll through your brush sizes, which is a very quick and convenient way to work. Use the bracket keys that are next to the "P". The left bracket will make your brush smaller and the right will make your brush larger.

You can now carefully darken those high lights in the background, which should complete the preparation of the main image as shown below.

Step 3. So far we have been working with the file size as it came off the camera, which is about 17*13 @ 72dpi, but we now need to bring this down to a more manageable size ready for the next stage. Call up your image size palette and make sure the image resample box is not ticked. Change the width to 10 inches and you will notice the resolution will increase.

What you have done is to change the size in inches, but retained all the information and quality (pixels) in the image. You also need to add a thin white line around your image to make it stand out from the border we will create next.

Hit Ctrl+A, which is the command for select all. The marching ants selection will appear around the edge of your picture. Make sure white is selected as your foreground colour and then select edit - stoke and choose the setting, Inside and 4 pixels width. Photoshop will create a 4 pixel line around the edge in white.

You now need to create the space around your cat to place the computer mouse, this will also form your border. Call up your layers palette (F7) and double click the thumbnail, which will allow you to rename the layer. You can change it to anything you like and cat is as good as any. This step is essential as when you create your border you require it to be transparent. Without this change from the default setting your border would take on the background colour. Select canvas size from the image menu and add 4 inches to the width and 4 inches to the height as shown below.

___________________________________

Step 4. Within your layers palette create a new blank layer by clicking the centre icon at the base of the palette. Drag that new layer beneath your cat so that you can create your background. A good tip is to use the eye dropper tool and clone two colours from within your main image for use in your background, but selecting them from the palette is fine. (See below)

We chose two shades of blue and then from the filter menu selected render - clouds. This command will flood your background with the two colours chosen and your image is now beginning to take shape. From the filter menu add 6 pixels of monochrome noise to your background, which just adds a nice light texture to the backdrop as shown below.

Computer generated colour can look artificial and plastic especially when printed alongside photographic images. The introduction of a little noise prevents this.

_________________________________

Step 5. You will now need to identify a computer mouse and we used our digital camera to photograph one. Use your magic wand to make a transparency by making a selection of all the background detail as we explained in project 1 and remove it using edit -cut from the menu bar. Make sure you remember to change the default name of the thumbnail in the layers palette or you will cut to the background colour and not to a transparency. Don't forget to feather the edge of your selection by 2 pixels before cutting and you will find the feather command in the select menu.

Drag the thumbnail of your mouse into the main picture area to make a third layer and using your move tool slide the mouse into position.

__________________________________

Step 6. This step is the final couple of touches that just improve the appearance of your picture. You need to create a slight drop shadow beneath the cat image and the mouse. Some later versions of Photoshop allow you to create quick shadows from the layers menu at the top of your screen, but there is another way.

From within the layers palette drag the thumbnail of your mouse down over the centre copy icon at the bottom of the palette. Photoshop will create a duplicate layer. Choose the bottom mouse and tick the tiny box on the layers palette called preserve transparency. With black as your foreground colour hit Alt+Del and the mouse shape will be flooded with black.

Take out the preserve transparency selection and you are now free to add gaussian blur from the filter menu and to adjust the opacity of your shadow from within the layers palette. Using the move tool you can also move the shadow slightly for effect. You can repeat this process for your main cat image and then stand back and admire your work, which should like this Below.

Click the thumbnail below to see the final image