

The final stage in Lightroom was to add some vignetting. I then decreased the vibrance and saturation, while increasing the temperature to create a warmer photo. I added some exposure to the cat’s face along with some localized sharpness. I changed the ratio to a square crop and tightened it in to both remove the white baseboard and get us closer to the fine detail on the cat’s face. My work in Lightroom was focused on improving the technical merits of the photo. The horizon is off, there are some busy background elements, and the bright white of the baseboard tends to draw the eye. The original shot, as you can see, has a quite a few flaws.

I will start with Lightroom, but you can imitate many of these steps in either a full version of Photoshop or even Elements. Best of all, I am including a coupon code for a discount copy of the software at the end of the tutorial! We are going to start with this: In today’s tutorial I want to demonstrate how that you can take an ordinary “snapshot” style photo and turn it into a handsome piece of art through the use of Alien Skin Snap Art 4.
