This is a shot of Tiggy, our youngest, taken at our local shopping mall a few days ago. She hasn't made too many appearances on the blog so far, but the older she gets the more she seems to like being photographed, so expect to see more shots of her soon :)

This is also the image I've used for this week's Mini-PSD. It's not an especially complex image – it was created using just four adjustment layers – but I think it neatly demonstrates that effective images don't necessarily require a complex sequence of steps to produce. The key to this one is the black and white adjustment layer, set to lighten her skin tones (without making her lips too bright), and brighten her eyes. After that it was just a matter of adding three curves: one (almost) global adjustment, another to slightly lighten the eyelashes above her eyes, and another to brighten the chair on the left side of the image.

Oh, and I also used Topaz's new InFocus plugin to sharpen her eyes. If you've take a look at the EXIF data you'll see that this was shot at f/2.8, so her eyes ended up being a bit softer than I would have liked. Once I'd run the image through InFocus though they looked a lot better. You probably won't be able to notice a great deal of difference at this resolution, but the high-res file looks a whole lot better.

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

1.14pm on 1/6/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 59mm f/2.8 1/40 aperture priority -1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 Topaz InFocus minor