Day 24: Time for Something Lighter

Welcome back to Thingadailies. After the doom and gloom book cover of the last few days, I've decided to go back and do a version of this Cat Butterfly Manipulation Photoshop Tutorial both because it's lighter and also because I want to try what they did with the sparkles near the end.

But since I have no idea how they're sourcing their pictures, I'm going to find my own. So it won't be identical.

Step 1: Find a cat

Ha! This was not a problem. I went with this image of my former foster kitten, Sabrett, of the reluctant weaners litter
.

Sabrett is on a lovely purple background, which might be a bit of a problem (because it really doesn't blend with her fur), but we'll work about that after I've chosen a background for the image.

A bit of quick and dirty isolation, and we have this. If I choose a dark enough background, I think the purple tinge around the edges won't matter. But if it does, I'll need to go in and clean up the edges more. Because of that, I'm holding off on adding hair to make it look less like the cat has been cut out. (I'll revisit this later.)

Step 2: Find a background

The tutorial started with a city at night scene, blurred it, and added a blue overlay. I'm starting with this:

In retrospect, the linear nature of the city scape might be a better choice, but I'm going to run with this for a while. Anyhow, I darkened it and messed with the colors, and now I have this:

Step 3: Rescale the cat

Really happy I didn't spent too much time on the back half of the cat now.

I promise this will look better soon! But right now, I need to go bathe the current foster cat in lime sulfur and bleach the heck out of the bathroom, so it will have to wait.

Tip of the day:

Don't give up on the project because it looks like crap now. Wait until you've really screwed it up.