Kaz at sunrise

This is a slightly adjusted photo of a shot I recently took of my dog, Kaz, in Edenbridge, Kent.

I've cropped the top and left a little and increased the saturation throughout. Also I've lightened Kaz a little as he was a bit too dark. What does everyone think? I still think the sharp foreground branches are a little distracting?

Blog entry at Dark Matter Magazine is here.

Question 1: What is the best way to convert an image from Photoshop (PSD, TIFF) to JPEG? What I normally do is save the PSD as a TIFF then go into ACDSee and convert it there at max. quality to a JPEG (thus keeping the EXIF data). But this photo really highlights a problem (or two) I've noticed in that converting to JPEG reduces the saturation and darkens the brightness. Is there a better way to convert to JPEG to keep the exact tone of the image as well as the EXIF info?

Question 2: I had to touch up the selection of Kaz as left alone he stuck out too much and his hair (especially his underneath) had a nasty line where one part of the image was dark+saturated and the other was bright+light. What's the best way to blend these areas? I used the smudge tool on the selection layer and the result seems OK.

The original photo has been printed in the UK newspaper, Kent & Sussex Courier. Scan is here and made it to into Explore on Jan 8, 2008 #434. The original can be viewed here and a scan of the newspaper print is here.

Prints are available.

Copyright © 2008 Kolin Tregaskes. All Rights Reserved.

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