When shooting your pets it is important to get down to their level and that is what we did with Skipper below.

The lighting was bright when we took this shot with a Nikon Coolpix 950, but Skipper was in the shade and the image straight from the camera needs a little work to get the best from it.

We are also going to introduce a vignette into the image that will not only add a little charm, but also cover up some of the bits around the edge of the image that detract from it. In addition we can add an attractive tilt to the eyes, which we failed to do at the taking stage.

Step 1. Call up the basic image of Skipper and choose Image-Rotate Canvas-Arbitrary from the menu bar. This command allows you to turn the whole picture clockwise (CW) or counter clock wise (CCW) to the angle you require. Choose a setting of 4 clockwise and hit enter.

This will add a just a little more tilt to the eyes, but now you will have to crop the image back to shape. Choose the crop tool from the menu bar and using the little toggles adjust the dotted line until you have removed the corners introduced by the turn command as shown below. When you are happy with your crop hit the enter button.

Step 2. One of the most impressive tools in Photoshop is the levels command and this picture demonstrates it's power better than most. Call up the levels palette via the image-adjust menu or by hitting the shortcut keys Ctrl+L.

Click the small eye dropper tool to the right of the three grouped together (above) and touch down on the lightest part of your image that retains detail. We found the best spot was just above the dogs nose and as you carry out this task the image will be transformed as you can see below.

This image will also benefit from a slight increase in colour saturation and you can find the hue and saturation palette in the image-adjust menu or via the shortcut keys Ctrl+U. Move the saturation slider to the right to a setting of about +30 as shown below.

Step 3. To create a vignette choose the oval marquee tool from the menu bar.

Tip..Some of the Photoshop tools are grouped together on the menu bar. To get access to them click into the square you want and the tools underneath pop up for you to make a choice. Many of the tools have other options and those that do have a tiny black icon on the bottom right of the square let you know more options are available.

With the oval marquee tool selected (shown above) draw out an oval shape central over your picture starting in the top left corner. This selection will only allow you to make changes to the centre area of your picture, but we need to effect just the outer edges. This is achieved by selecting, Select-Inverse from the menus at the top of your screen.

To create an effective vignette you will need to feather the edge of this selection by calling up Select-Feather. Choose a high feather radius of about 100 to give you a soft feathered edge to your vignette.

With white selected as your foreground colour hit Alt+Del and the vignette shape will flood with white. A final touch while the shape is still selected is to add 3 pixels of monochrome noise so that the colour you added blends better with the rest of the image. Your final picture if you have used the original file should not look too far off the one below.

Vignettes don't have to be white and with a different type of image almost any colour can be used as long as it is in keeping with that image. The beauty of digital imaging is that you can try many variations before committing to one choice.