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Pets and People Challenge

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This was the May Assignment in the Community! You’re welcome to still complete it and post it in the Challenges section of the Community, however you won’t receive a tag for your profile. You can still use it toward your Snoot awards.

This Challenge was brought to you by Sabrina.

A “classic” pose from a client shoot from 2022 (ignore the distracting things left and right 🤓). 

We all know, pets & people can be hard. Tricky to pose, to manage and sometimes it is intimidating to direct our clients/ the owner and tell them what we want them to do. BUT you all know, we only learn when we try something new and leave our comfort zone, even if it’s only with one toe for the start. In this month’s assignment, we want you to try something different than only the „classic“ portrait where the dog and owner sit next to each other and look at the camera or look at each other.

Don’t get me wrong, these photos are beautiful too and for me a must capture in every shoot to get one classic shot. I often use it as the starter pose and work myself towards a more individual pose together with the team to include their uniqueness. We want our clients to go home with a variety of shots showing different moments, feelings, characteristics, moods and energies. You do not need to invent something knew, but we challenge you to try something you never did before. Grab your friend, family member, neighbor, model or even client (when you feel comfortable with it in that situation) with their dog (or take a self portrait if you want to show off or have no other option 😄) and create one image that shows their bond, character, feelings with their connection. 

Some ideas what you could switch up coming from the classic – sitting next to each other – pose with a semi telephoto lens:

  • Pose and position of the dog/owner
  • Angle
  • Lens 
  • Different kinds of movement
  • details and candid moments
  • Visual forms of connection (touch, lines, gazing direction,…)
  • Integration of the location
  • Anything else you can think of!

Just some examples of different poses t show that they help with variety and different moods which give us an overall feeling of their connection, bond and character. Most of the time I use my fave lenses: 135mm, 85mm & 35mm

Little tip on directing people

Take some time to think of your idea or what you want to capture. Maybe save some poses to your phone and try to recreate them. Be bold directing the person in front of you! Only you can see how it looks from the outside and also in the final image. If their hand could be better placed – tell them! If their hair is messy – go fix it! You can do all this very kind and soft. Try to avoid saying something negative and instead say something like „That already looks great, now gently start petting your dog at his chest with your left hand. *moves the hand to a better place* Yes perfect, that is so sweet!“. Reassure them when something is good and make tiny adjustments one after another. That way you’re constantly leading them so they feel safe and confident and at the same time you’re getting many different poses and moments, no stiffness because of the movement and a great variety of shots.

To Complete the Assignment 

Your assignment submission should be a new photo, not one you have lying around (after all, what are you learning/achieving then?)

Go and take your photos! Pick your favourite one (or make a collection of up to 5 images, to compare them. They don’t need to be final edits, light adjustments are enough) and upload them to the Challenges topic in the Community, in order for the entry to count toward your Snoot Awards.

Different Action Challenge

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This was the April Assignment in the Community! You’re welcome to still complete it and post it in the Challenges section of the Community, however you won’t receive a tag for your profile. You can still use it toward your Snoot awards.

With Chris’ “Sideways Action” webinar happening on April 6th, this month’s member assignment is focused around action!

But! In the spirit of creativity, pushing you out of your comfort zone, and encouraging you to try something different, we didn’t want typical action photos, eg., dog running toward the camera/jumping a log toward the camera.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with these photos, but the goal of the assignments is to stretch your skillset, to expand your horizons, and to encourage you to experiment and try different things. If you’ve never done a run-to-the-camera photo before, then of course this course be an option for you, but I would encourage the majority of you to explore other options. The same can be said for any of the ideas below. If you’re quite familiar with shooting discdog for example, maybe try something else.

Some ideas could be:

  • sideways action
  • leaping/flying
  • dog sports (agility, discdog, dock diving, herding, canicross, dancing with dogs, search and rescue, etc)
  • two dogs playing
  • treat catching
  • panning/slow shutter speeds
  • anything else you can think of!

Panning action is HARD 😅 (settings here: 1/40 sec, f/4, ISO 100)

To Complete the Assignment

Take some time to think of your idea or what you want to capture. Your assignment submission should be a new photo, not one you have lying around (after all, what are you learning/achieving then?)

Go and take your photos! Pick your favourite one and upload it to the Challenges topic in the Community, in order for the entry to count toward your Snoot Awards.

Reflections Challenge

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This was the March Assignment in the Community! You’re welcome to still complete it and post it in the Challenges section of the Community, however you won’t receive a tag for your profile. You can still use it toward your Snoot awards.

When we think of reflections, most of us think of water. Puddles, lakes, standing pools without much movement…

But reflections give you an amazing opportunity to be creative! This assignment is about both reflections, and about thinking outside the box.

While your assignment is to take a photo featuring a reflection, we are encouraging you to move beyond reflections in puddles or pools of water (although this is totally ok too, if that’s something new to you, something you’ve always wanted to try, or is already enough of a challenge for you!) and experiment with other kinds of reflections!

Some ideas for where to find or how to create reflections include:

  • those buildings with super reflective glass walls
  • using mirrors – big and small! Small mirrors can be held up beneath, above, beside your lens to create cool effects, even your phone’s screen can create a reflection! Big mirrors can be used in a HUGE number of ways even outdoors, to create fun effects and stories
  • eyes can have reflections in them. How can you use that to your advantage? 
  • why not create a story? Spray some water on a window-pane for a rain effect and photograph your dog gazing through to the outside world. 
  • you could take a fairly normal reflection photo in water, and use Photoshop to make that photo a bit more magical! What about an adult dog looking into the reflection of his puppy self? What if the real dog was looking away, while the reflected dog looked directly up at the real world?
  • remember, water is also ok especially if you’re still Beginning! You can also play with perspectives with water reflection, composition, ripples, and more

To Complete the Assignment

Take some time to think of your idea or what you want to capture. It needs to feature some kind of reflection.

Go and take your photos! Pick your favourite one and upload it to the Challenges topic in the Community, in order for the entry to count toward your Snoot Awards.

Gradient Challenge

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Challenges Gradient Challenge

This Challenge is brought to you by Sabrina, and is going to take you through how to add colours to the sky of your photos! This is a rather advanced editing Challenge for those of you who know your way around Photoshop and are ready to play with a number of adjustment layers!

0 RAW Gradients Challenge Final with Logo Web size
Download the RAW Files here

RAW FILES NOTE:  IMG4933.CR3 is the main one and the blue-tagged ones are the additional panorama files. The psb file is the stitched panorama file for those who just want to play with the gradients and do not have the skills yet to stitch it into a panorama. 

About the Challenge

This editing challenge is supposed to help you to get the hang of what gradients are capable of, what different blend modes can achieve, and that a cloudy and rainy day isn’t at all wasted. Because when you’re traveling you don’t always have a chance to go back, so take that photo!

Of course, these edits are a bit more “extreme” and maybe artsy with the fake sunrise. BUT first of all, who says that it needs to look real in order to look good? And second, if you can make such an extreme edit look good, you can use the same techniques to emphasize your existing golden hour/ light situation which might just need a bit of help to really pop. And with the knowledge of combining everything about light and colors with gradients, you can do that and much more.

Even though this is a more advanced edit in Photoshop, feel free to use this photo to play around with gradients to your liking. There is an already stitched panorama Photoshop file to use, if you’re not at this point in your journey yet, so you can have a play too!

The Process

The RAW File

Lightroom:

  1. White balance. I added a tiny bit of yellow and magenta, keeping in mind that I want to go for a warmer edit in the end.
  2. Global adjustments: Just the normal things. Drop highlights a bit, and pull up shadows a bit to get some more of the details back in her face and in the clouds, I did nearly no changes to the colors
  3. Selective edits: I am lazy at this part 😄 Most of the time I use LR subject selection to brighten the whole dog a bit or just the face and make a bigger radial filter where I drop the highlights to create a really soft vignette (which is barely noticeable, so you can leave that out if you want)

This is the Lightroom version:

Now the interesting part in Photoshop starts!

I only had a 35mm lens, there was nearly no shore on the side of the road where I stopped to take the photo. And it was raining, so no chance in going deeper into the water – also water is not Kenzy’s favorite element 😄 That is why I quickly took additional empty frames on location like most of the time. Lucky me, because at home I saw that the rain cover of my camera created a hazy effect on the left and would have ruined the photo if I hadn’t had some extra shots. Panorama for the win!

Creating panorama & retouching

  1. I selected all the photos I might need to create the panorama and opened them as layers in Photoshop. I chose a crop that is a bit bigger than what I wanted the final edit to be.
  2. I deselected all the layers and moved my main photo to the bottom. After that, I selected the next layer above, reduced the opacity to 50%, and used the handlers to position the layer where it needed to be. Back to 100% opacity and creat a mask to mask in the parts I needed. I always try to make the edge as smooth as possible without losing too much time and get back at each layer for a check-up on any weird things happening later. Do that for each layer until your panorama is done. I often stitch my panoramas by hand, you can try if Photoshop or Lightroom does a decent job for once. But mine most of the time doesn’t. 
  3. Crop to the size you want it the final image to be & create a layer that contains all the layers above Cmd+optn+Shift+E (mac)/ Strg+alt+shift+E (win) & duplicate (for safety)
  4. I removed some annoying things in the background on the mountain, her eye boogies, and some smaller things. Nothing big to work on here.
  5. You can sharpen here or in the end but underneath the following adjustment layers
Before Panorama:

After Panorama:

Shaping light

  1. One curves layer brightening the face & chest
  2. One curves layer darkening the edges on the bottom and the sides to create a vignette. Sky stays open for now because we will work on that later
  3. One curves layer with linear contrast dropping the opacity to around 60ish to get back some contrast in the whole picture
  4. Curves layer to get back some details in the sky by darkening the highlights
  5. Levels layer to add some black into the fur again and get back some contrast

Color

To be honest, there is not much happening right there except for removing the yellow color cast in the chest and making the water more of an overall blue-green instead of having blue and green patches. I kept the trees and the rest nearly as they were before because I didn’t know where I would go with this edit at this point. I also desaturated the stones in the foreground because they were distracting.

After that, some dodge & burn aka face and body contouring happened and I added back some color to the eyes in the color group.

Gradient magic

Now to the special and fancy stuff like gradients and gradient maps, which makes it possible to turn the image into something more sepcial!

I wish I could give you some workflow on hand to follow here to achieve exactly this, but it is a trial-and-error process. Some of the gradients I used aren’t doing much in the end and I could have done it with less, but I was experimenting myself because it was the second photo I did this particular “method” on. I know what gradients can do, but never used them like this. Just as a reminder: Allow yourself to experiment and do stuff, that might end up looking crappy. No one needs to see them.

Back to our edit. I used various gradients with different blend modes to get a sunrise effect and I was going for a yellow sun with a bit of blue at the top of the image. Like right before the sun is peeking behind the mountains.

  1. In order to do that I used an empty layer, the gradient tool, and chose a linear gradient that went from light blue to yellow. I positioned it with the yellow above the mountains and the blue on the very edge at the top of the image. The blend mode was on color because first I wanted to add color in the sky. I masked out the sky, but don’t forget to let the light and color spill over the edges of the mountains! 
  2. Duplicated the layer and added some more color and more orange. Mask again, you don’t want the same mask because it will create harsher edges.
  3. On top of that, I added some blue gradients on color blend mode for the water to be more evenly colored in a blue tone which seems to not be touched by the sun yet.
  4. Some radial gradients behind the dog mimic the light coming out behind the mountains and spilling over the edge. Don’t forget to soften the edges of the dog’s mask to avoid the sticker effect
  5. Gradient maps with blues in the shadows and yellows in the highlights over the whole image, except the dog

They are all building up on each other. I used the blend mode color to get more color in the sky, soft light to get a soft hazy light effect with some color, the same for normal blend mode on really low opacity, and also screen for some glow. But keep an eye on not to overpower the dog.

Sky adjustments

Looking at the yellow fake sunrise it felt … fake. That’s why I made some more adjustments and went for the moment before the sun gets up or after it’s gone. When blue hour is fading/ about to start. 

  1. First I changed the colors to more of an orange & violet instead of yellow & blue with 3 Hue/Saturation layers on colorize adding the color I wanted in the parts of the image I wanted it to be (Group “adding color”)
  2. Darken the edges and also bring back more contrast in the clouds.

 

Final touches

  1. I always smoosh the layers with Cmd/Strg + option/alt + Shift + E and open the camera Raw filter to add some clarity around 6-7.
  2. Also, check the histogram for possible peaking and remove with selective editing and reducing highlights.
  3. Added a tiny bit ot contrast or with this one also dehazed a bit to get more contrast. Watch out because the colors become more saturated being darkened and dehazing cools the image down. You may need to add some yellow back in and correct the white balance.

Final Image:

 

Once you've finished the challenge....

Make sure you download this story, save it somewhere safe to collect the whole set, and share it to your socials!

Challenges Gradient Challenge

How to add it to your story (iOS Version, but I’m sure Android is similar?)

  1. Save the image above. Either right click and choose “Save image” or similar option, then send it to your phone, as well as your edited photo. Or, long press on your phone & choose save image. 
  2.  Open Instagram. 
  3. Swipe right to upload a new story
  4.  Tap the bottom left corner. Select the template image.
  5. Go back to your photos app
  6. Press the share button, bottom left corner.
  7. Press “Copy”
  8. Go back to Instagram
  9. Select to add some text, with the aA button along the top menu.
  10. Tap where the flashing text cursor is. Select “paste”
  11. Drag and resize to fit
  12. Remember to tag @inspawrationphotography and the photographer of the photo you edited! (Could be me, or someone else!)
  13. Press “Your Stories” at the bottom to share!
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Beginning Editing Challenge: Pitrie

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Challenges Beginning Editing Challenge: Pitrie
DSC01816-3 DSC01816

This Editing Challenge is perfect for beginners! The edit was made using Lightroom only, so you don’t need any fancy Photoshop knowledge to work with this RAW file.

Below, you’ll find the different radials I used, as well as screenshots of the global adjustments I made… HOWEVER! Simply copying my settings will likely NOT help you learn…. it will help you learn how to copy settings, and that’s about all. If you see that I’ve used the HSL panel, have a go at adjusting the settings yourself first. If you get stuck or you’re not achieving the results you want, then check back in on my settings, and use them to guide you.

Instead, ask yourself: “What effects can I see in the before/after? What colours? What is the contrast like? What tools/options might I need to use to achieve these same results?’

Download the RAW file here

Here’s what I did:

Global Adjustments:

I actually adjusted the tone curve at the end of this one to bring a bit more vibrance and contrast into the image.

HSL Panel adjustments

Selective Edits

As you can see in the screenshots above, there were multiple masks and selective edits. You can do these in whatever order makes sense for you – it doesn’t really matter.

Essentially, I:

  • Raised whites, texture and clarity on the whole face
  • Desaturated the chest
  • Lowered highlights in the background and on the tree
  • More lowering highlights
  • Created an open vignette
  • Worked on the eye in three separate parts: catchlights, iris and pupil.
  • Removed some blue from his nose
  • Made a spotlight
  • Added some dehaze behind him, balanced out by raising saturation a bit so it didn’t go grey
  • Raised whites and contrast on the whole dog
  • Added some blue and cyan to the right hand side as it was a funny colour compared to the rest of the image.
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Spooky Season Challenge

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Challenges Spooky Season Challenge

Welcome to our Spooky Themed Challenge! With Halloween right around the corner, it’s the perfect time to embrace the spooky and create enchanting pet photos. This challenge is all about unleashing your creativity and capturing the eerie essence of Halloween. It’s a great excuse to use props and costumes, and to go crazy on editing.

It’s also a time to get creative. You’ll see a lot of dogs wearing sheets as ghosts… so how can you mix up the idea and put your own spin on it? Try to think out the box and you’ll probably have a lot more fun, and come up with some unique ideas.

I did my halloween photos years ago (gallery at the end) and it was really fun to go in with a plan and a concept and shoot  in a completely different way than I normally would – because I was aiming for a very specific look and theme, rather than showing the dog’s majesty or power, or telling a magical story.

Journey was SUCH a good sport getting wrapped up in all these webs, bless him.

Some tips for the challenge:

1. Choosing the Right Location: To set the stage for your spooky pet photos, start by finding a location that exudes an eerie atmosphere. Think dark and dense woods with gnarled, dead trees, or any other spooky setting you can find. Sparkly bokeh and open skies likely won’t work for this sky. Look for solid backgrounds. Remember: dark and foreboding woods doesn’t necessarily mean an absence of light!!! You still need light for these photos to work.

2. Props and Costumes: Get into the Halloween spirit by using props and costumes. Fake spiderwebs, bones, a jack-o-lantern, or any other Halloween-themed items can add a creepy touch to your photos. Don’t forget that costumes can bring an extra layer of charm to your shots.

3. Expression Matters: Consider the expression of your furry model. Spooky photos often work best when your pet has a mysterious, serious, intense or even worried expression. While happy and open mouths are adorable, they may not suit the eerie theme. Loki’s sweet and hopeful expression as he hands the bone back to Death being the exception, so of course it depends on the story and scene you’re creating.

4. Watch the light: Even in a dark and spooky location, it’s essential to ensure your pet’s face is well-lit. Proper lighting is the key to making your photos both eerie and recognizable and aren’t overwhelmed by noise and grain by having to bump the ISO like crazy. 

5. Elevate with Editing: After capturing your spooky shots, don’t hesitate to take your editing skills to the next level. During post-processing, consider:

  • Darkening the image a lot more than you usually might, just keep in mind HOW LIGHT WORKS. What would be very dark? What would be less dark?
  • Desaturating colors to make your photos more monochromatic.
  • Adding a cold, grey-green cast to intensify the eerie atmosphere.

6. Fog and Smoke Overlays: For that extra touch of spookiness, try incorporating fog or smoke overlays during the editing process. These effects can add depth and enhance the overall atmosphere of your photos. You can have a look at how to add fog in this lesson.

I generally use a fog-shaped brush and stamp it on a new layer. You can find fog brushes on Etsy, or search “photoshop fog brush” for other options.

Death was actually from a stock image I found on Pexels or Pixabay or similar.

 

The Challenge: Now that you have all the tools and tips, it’s time for the challenge!

Your task is to capture a spooky-themed pet photo using the guidelines we’ve discussed. Let your creativity run wild, experiment with different ideas, and have fun with the process.

Enter the challenge following the normal process (Upload to the Community, comment on someone else’s challenge entry, and mark this lesson as “Complete”) and have FUN with it!

We can’t wait to see your spooky contributions!

Some SOOCs or with LR edits
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Portfolio Challenge: Anchor

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Challenges Portfolio Challenge: Anchor

If you’re someone who wants to take on clients of any kind, whether for portrait sessions, to be hired to cover dog sport events, to do UGC or Commercial photography, you’re going to need a portfolio.

A portfolio is how potential clients can see what your work is about. Your technical skills, and your style. 

Depending on what kind of photography you intend to do, it may be worthwhile to have more than one portfolio. For example, I have one for my portrait sessions (which probably currently needs a bit of an update!) and one for product photography. After all, my product photography clients rarely want full fine-art edits, and don’t care about dogs posing majestically in the woods. They want to know if I can take a photo of a bed, a leash, a car seat cover. 

It would be easy enough to make a challenge that said: “Go and make your portfolio with 10-15 images.” and give you guidelines for that, however I think I’ll save that for another full lesson, as I want this challenge to be a jumping off point, rather than something overwhelming that you’re not going to attempt. 

I know that choosing your 10-15 images to represent your work can be really difficult! That’s where this challenge comes in.

Here’s the challenge:

Find 2-4 photos that will act as “anchors” for your portfolio.

These photos should be your typical style/location/colours/light. They should be technically very good, and edited in your typical way. Eg., if you don’t normally mess with the colours of the sky like crazy, your anchor probably shouldn’t be one where you went from grey overcast to pink dawn.

The idea is to use these 4 images as a guide as to what else you might like to include in your portfolio. By building other images around your anchors, it should help your portfolio feel cohesive. 

My 4 anchor images might look something like this.

Interestingly, while writing out this challenge, I realised I had no deep green forest photos in my portfolio, despite this being a HUGE part of my photography style!

Basically, you want 2-4 images that best represent what you do. For me, it’s:

  • Backlight and intensity
  • Warm oranges and touching moments
  • Deep greens
  • Magical storytelling (warm tones and greens)

It’s maybe no surprise that these are 4 of my favourite photos, but not all of my favourites… because my other favourites fit into one of those categories. So the anchor helps me build out the portfolio using those themes/ideas/categories. 

The idea of using anchors can also help you trim things that don’t fit from your portfolio. For example, I had one of my favourite photos of Piet standing in front of a waterfall in my portfolio. I love it, but the likelihood of going to such a waterfall with a client is very slim. 

On the other hand, I left some frisbee shots in there, because it would be fun to do this kind of action photography in the future, so if an owner with a frisbee dog wanted to book me, I’d be up for it!

So using these anchors doesn’t mean you need to get rid of everything else, but it CAN be a useful starting point for building your own portfolio and to give you some guidance in how to make it cohesive and make sense. 

Once you have your anchor images, make sure you post them over in the “Challenges” topic in the Learning Community!

Remember, this method of getting your portfolio set up might not work for everyone. 

And, that what you choose now, is not your “forever portfolio”. There’s no right or wrong choices here. You can always change the photos at a later date! So, don’t agonise over your choices. Imperfect action beats perfect inaction every time!

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Pricing for Profit: Guest Speaker Nicole Begley

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Business Pricing for Profit: Guest Speaker Nicole Begley

This week we were joined by business-guru supreme, Nicole Begley from Hair of the Dog Academy.

In this guest talk, we discussed:

  • How to get $2-3k average sales, and that this is achievable in ANY market
  • How NOT to price your work
  • How to determine your price-list (worksheet included – download it below!)
  • 3 stages of business
  • The key? MESSAGING
  • What o you want to sell and how do you price it?
  • How do clients decide who to hire?
  • A brief discussion on mock-ups and showing art on walls
  • How to find high-paying clients
Download the PDF
Download the Pricing Worksheet

About Nicole and Hair of the Dog:

Hair of the Dog Academy is a comprehensive community in which we go deep into what it takes to build a profitable pet photography business with easy to follow step-by-step actions – and a good side of mindset shifting.  

If you join as a yearly member before August 15th, you’ll get a 30-minute 1:1 call with Nicole as a bonus (a $375 value) – which will help you hit the ground running and know exactly what to focus on next in your business.  

 
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Hijinx in Green: Full Tutorial

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Editing: Tutorials Hijinx in Green: Full Tutorial
DSC01244-Pano-2 DSC01244-Pano-2-Edit
Download the raw Files here

This was such a fun little edit! Making a panorama, taking our overly bright photo and deepening those greens, working through so many of my normal process.

Make sure you download the 4 raw files from above. To take this photo, I used my panorama technique which I cover in depth in the Learning Journey. But in this case, I’d gotten a bit too close to Hijinx as I’d only JUST gotten into position but hadn’t framed up the photo yet, and was expecting him to look toward me, when he looked so beautifully to the side and into this lighter, open space. 

I could either forgo the shot and move backward/change my perspective to be lower, and wait for him to look at me to have better composition…

Or I could take the photo with the perfect gazing direction and expression, and take extra photos of the scene to “build out” later in editing. So, that’s what we’re going to do. 

Make sure you check out the step by step editing process that accompanies this video, but remember! You don’t have to do the exact settings as me, with the exact numbers. 

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Editing Dogs in Landscapes

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Editing: Tutorials Editing Dogs in Landscapes

Watch the video tutorial below to edit this image step by step. My process for editing landscapes is a fair bit different to my normal process in that:

  • I don’t shape the light nearly as much
  • I’m a bit more flexible with colour-grading and don’t mind if the dogs get a little coloured
  • I am not obsessing quite as much about drawing attention to the subject (especially through use of light and dark) but instead about creating a balance between the subject and the landscape
  • I may use self-created presets for series of images taken in the same landscape with similar lighting, to speed up the process
  • I make more use of the HSL panel, and the colour grading panel in LR/ACR than I normally do.
DSC04402 DSC04402-Edit

Beware the glow!

Often, when editing our landscape photos, we need to quite dramatically darken the sky, while brightening our subject. Depending on how you do this, it can quite quickly create a glowing white halo around your subjects. If you’re using the adjustment brush to adjust exposures, this glow will be larger and soft. If you’re using “select subject”, it’s likely to be smaller and sharper.

It’s difficult to get rid of this glow without spending a lot of time very precisely adjusting your masks. Therefore I recommend gradually fading your exposure adjustments, using radial filters in a not-too-specific way, and avoiding as much as possible big exposure adjustments between subject and background. Not always possible! 

One way to see the glow is to zoom right out on your photo and look at it thumbnail size. And make sure you come back to it with fresh eyes later on!

Check your masks

Similar to “beware the glow”, do a good, thorough check of your masks if you’re darkening the sky and brightening your subjects, especially if you’re using a “Select Subject” tool. Often, it can miss small bits and pieces (see below example!) and these can look very strange and out of place!

Watch out as well that the new masking features don’t just blur furry parts of your subject, or parts where some fur meets the background and it has a hard time finding the edges. You will want to fix these masks up.

Below: before & after. If you see these blurry edges, just use the brush tool to either add or remove the effect from where it’s blurry.

Mask blurred edges Mask blurred edges 2
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