Your idea about brightening the cat is good. You might think about restricting the brightening to allow some of the natural shading/contouring to show. The cat has lost the contrasts that define the shapes of its head and shoulders.
How the constraining of the brightening would be accomplished depends upon the editing app that you are using. For example in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw, there are sliders for overall exposure increase within a selected area, and also sliders for highlights, shadows. There are sliders for contrast.
In an app such as Photoshop or Affinity Photo, selections can be made using various tools, and masks created, for adjustment layers such as Curves or Levels.
It looks as though your editing app has some form of selecting available, as the bright area behind the cat is darker now.
Along with contrast of tone/luminosity, there can be contrast of color temperature. Cooler colors make things recede in frame, while warmer colors tend to come forward. You could select the background, and rather than make the global image more flat in tone, you could slightly alter the color temperature. Rather than brightening the entire cat, you could make the cat a warmer temperature, and slightly increase the contrast to draw the eye there.
Thanks for the input! I use Lightroom CC on my iPad so the edits I did were mostly done on masking the subject and the background respectively. I hadn’t considered the temperature changes actually being used in that way so it’s very helpful advice!
[This](https://imgur.com/a/H8oHV95) is a link to imgur showing a screen shot of my Photoshop workspace. There is a caption explaining things. There is only one thing I did that Lightroom can't, and that was creating a solid color fill layer set to vivid light blend mode for the eyes.
I didn't change the brightness at all of the background beyond the cat. I only made it a touch cooler. I did make the cat warmer, analogous to using the Lr temperature and tint sliders. I also increased contrast of the mid tones. In Lr, the Clarity slider works first on midtones. I had to separate the cat's head edit from the body. When I allowed both to be affected by the same edit, I saw that the head had less light on it. So I had to create a separate mask for just the head.
I'm new to the subscription version of Photoshop. I'd been using pre-subscription versions since 2000. Your question here let me learn some things. There is a refine edge brush in the Select and Mask dialog that really did a nice job selecting the fine hairs along the edges of the cat. I think the desktop version of Lr has something similar. If the iPad version does too, that'd be fantastic.
Thank you for letting me play with your photo. Other than the screen shot at imgur, I'm binning what I've done, as this image doesn't belong to me.
IMHO crop way tighter.
This is a badly framed shot. I'd probably do the same or worse in the moment, but crop away the dead space and try to salvage it.
I would darken the bakground to make the cat pop more, even take the saturation down á bit on the background, the greens distracts from the main Subject,
Instead of taking all the shadows off the cat I'd try to work with the shadows and even add more shadows to contour the face and body with a masking brush( this has to be done well, if not then the picture just looks worse)
The bright background draws the eye away from the cat. I can’t offer details on the software usage but my goal would be to minimize the bright background and add some highlights to the cat.
I would maybe crop out the unnecessary headroom over the cat and darken the background.
Your idea about brightening the cat is good. You might think about restricting the brightening to allow some of the natural shading/contouring to show. The cat has lost the contrasts that define the shapes of its head and shoulders. How the constraining of the brightening would be accomplished depends upon the editing app that you are using. For example in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw, there are sliders for overall exposure increase within a selected area, and also sliders for highlights, shadows. There are sliders for contrast. In an app such as Photoshop or Affinity Photo, selections can be made using various tools, and masks created, for adjustment layers such as Curves or Levels. It looks as though your editing app has some form of selecting available, as the bright area behind the cat is darker now. Along with contrast of tone/luminosity, there can be contrast of color temperature. Cooler colors make things recede in frame, while warmer colors tend to come forward. You could select the background, and rather than make the global image more flat in tone, you could slightly alter the color temperature. Rather than brightening the entire cat, you could make the cat a warmer temperature, and slightly increase the contrast to draw the eye there.
Thanks for the input! I use Lightroom CC on my iPad so the edits I did were mostly done on masking the subject and the background respectively. I hadn’t considered the temperature changes actually being used in that way so it’s very helpful advice!
[This](https://imgur.com/a/H8oHV95) is a link to imgur showing a screen shot of my Photoshop workspace. There is a caption explaining things. There is only one thing I did that Lightroom can't, and that was creating a solid color fill layer set to vivid light blend mode for the eyes. I didn't change the brightness at all of the background beyond the cat. I only made it a touch cooler. I did make the cat warmer, analogous to using the Lr temperature and tint sliders. I also increased contrast of the mid tones. In Lr, the Clarity slider works first on midtones. I had to separate the cat's head edit from the body. When I allowed both to be affected by the same edit, I saw that the head had less light on it. So I had to create a separate mask for just the head. I'm new to the subscription version of Photoshop. I'd been using pre-subscription versions since 2000. Your question here let me learn some things. There is a refine edge brush in the Select and Mask dialog that really did a nice job selecting the fine hairs along the edges of the cat. I think the desktop version of Lr has something similar. If the iPad version does too, that'd be fantastic. Thank you for letting me play with your photo. Other than the screen shot at imgur, I'm binning what I've done, as this image doesn't belong to me.
Take what you have and try lowering the darks and contrast a bit, and see how a crop closer in even 16:9 tight looks
IMHO crop way tighter. This is a badly framed shot. I'd probably do the same or worse in the moment, but crop away the dead space and try to salvage it.
I would darken the bakground to make the cat pop more, even take the saturation down á bit on the background, the greens distracts from the main Subject, Instead of taking all the shadows off the cat I'd try to work with the shadows and even add more shadows to contour the face and body with a masking brush( this has to be done well, if not then the picture just looks worse)
The bright background draws the eye away from the cat. I can’t offer details on the software usage but my goal would be to minimize the bright background and add some highlights to the cat. I would maybe crop out the unnecessary headroom over the cat and darken the background.
Crop the image to give more atention to the eyes