I used a photo from my photo library for this exercise. The image is only of my dog in the garden but I purposefully used a photo that was over exposed with lots of highlight clipping to show the effect better.
Here is Lucky looking rather grey and with highlights blocking out some detail due to the over exposure. To make Lucky stand out more in this image I firstly used the 'magnetic lasso tool', that I have available in Photoshop elements, to outline the dog.
This took a few attempts to get the lasso only around the dog. Due to loss of detail and tones, the outline kept including grass and leaves as it couldn't differentiate the border between the two. But by zooming in and taking my time, I got a pretty good outline.
Now that the dog is highlighted, I adjusted some elements to make the dog stand out more from the background. I darkened the highlights as well as decreasing the brightness and increasing the contrast.
This made the dog darker in appearance and toned down the overexposure on him, making the tones and shadows increase and giving Lucky his black colouring back. By doing this some of the detail has been restored also.
Conclusion:
This was a good exercise to undertake. I still feel that this effect is an innocent and legitimate adjustment because as with the previous exercise, I believe this is just enhancing the image and not actually altering the physical appearance of the subject. Should I have changed the colouring of the dogs fur by altering so much the dog appeared golden in colour then maybe we would be bordering on falsifying again, as stated in the previous exercise. The photographers eye is capturing an image and sometimes equipment/nature can alter the original vision, for example overexposure, dust on the lens, not enough light. I think little adjustments like this to enhance the 'overall image', as opposed to enhancing the actual subject's features, to make it more appealing to the viewer is only natural completely justifiable.
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