Midterm Project

The first image I wanted to do was corrupt so I had to put these together....
I made copies before I started-and then I checked the color levels through the channels on the image of the little girl and the only thing I had to adjust was taking some of the blue out so I went the the Color Balance and did the auto color and it changed just to my liking I then went and reduce the highlights to get some definitin in the snow and changed the midtones a little as well and this took the blue out.
The first thing I did with the cat image was check the color levels and that seemed okay so I went to the shadows since this image was overexposed I increased the shadows about 30 percent. Taking this image proved difficult as the edges of the cat were very light and it was hard to make as great as a selection as they did in the book with the giraffe-I basically tried all the tactics they did such as grow, similiar and it didn't pick it up too much but I was okay with using the quick selection tool to choose him. I used the History tool often to go back and forth with the selection as it was at times hard to choose the light colors of his hair.
Once I saw that the selection was under par I decided I would use the spot healing tools to bring definition into the edges and it worked pretty good. I then cropped the cat out of the image and used the free transform to make him bigger to fit into the picture. I then used special effects and used the color overlay and then blend mode and used the color picker to choose a bluish color so it would match the snow and then show the gradiet overlay to make the light pattern look similiar to the way the light was casting on the little girl.
It was fun to use everything we learned so far-I made sure I used the color channels to get the blue out of the snow, I used the shadow/highlight tool on the cat photo as the original was overexposed, I used the blend modes for the overlays, the free transform to make the cat bigger, I made the images the same size, and I used the heal patch tool to bring definition into parts of the cat-mostly the edges, the histogram was my most handy dandy tool in that whenever I wanted to go back a couple stept I just clicked on it within this and I liked it as it showed me exactly what tool I was using-served as a good reminder for me, the magic wand is good but the magic selection tool worked best for me in choosing the cat. I tried the marquee tools, but I just don't care for these so I didn't use them, I used the cropping tool to crop part of the cat out as I didn't use the whole cat-he just didn't fit into the space that well so I had to crop part of him out. The gradients and overlay are a great set of filters that I hope to remember to use. I didn't have to use the saturation or hue tools for this, even though I tried them in changing the blue out of the snow-the better option was in the color channels. It was was to use the healing and patching tools in cleaning up the cat. I am glad I was able to use everything I learned so far.
It will not upload my image at this I will try later.