Texture Tuesday :: Phoebe and Free and Easy

Last week got away from me again, so instead of stressing myself out on Saturday to finish last week's Texture Tuesday challenge, I decided to combine it with this week's Free and Easy eDition at the Kim Klassen Cafe.

This sweet kitty lives at Camp 18, where I went a few weeks ago with some of the members of our neighborhood photo group. I'm not sure, but I think it's the same kitty whose photo I took when I went there during the summer. There are several resident cats, so I'm not sure.

It has such a pensive look on it's face, so I thought it would be fitting to use Kim's texture, "Dream". I  also used one layer of "Phoebe" from last week's challenge.

{mouse-over for sooc}

I was tempted to be silly and use a photo of a mouse for the "mouse-over", but reason prevailed, because I wanted to show how I used the Liquify Filter to make the top of the kitty's head less flat. You may have to M.O. a couple of times to see it. It's a very fun technique! Another tip I learned from  Matt Kloskowski in one of his Photoshop Killer Tip videos is to make a selection of the area you want to work on, because Liquify is very processor intense tool. By the way, there's a link to all of his videos on my sidebar.

As you can see, I labeled the layers so you can see what I did and so I can remember, too :-) Stamp Visible (Command+Option+Shift+E on a Mac) merges the layers below it, but they can still be edited. If you Merge or Flatten the layers, you will no longer be able to do so. This is a tip from Matt's book, Layers.

I applied a Gaussian Blur Filter to soften the overall image, but then I used Unsharp Mask to make the kitty's face more, well, sharp. I inverted the mask to hide the sharpening and painted it back in with a soft round white brush. On the second Stamp Visible layer, I used the Burn tool to darken the rim (not sure what it's called) under his/her eyes.

I masked the kitty on the texture layers, feathered the mask by 2 pixels and reduced the density to 80% and 50%, respectively. Rather than taking the time to create two separate masks, I Option clicked on the first one and dragged it to the the second texture layer to copy it. I think I learned this from Kim :-)

Again, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask :-) And have a Happy Thanksgiving!!!