I photographed this wonderful animal this afternoon and will be putting him into the Animals Ecards section of Quillcards in the next couple of days.

The question is, which version will I use? It is the same animal processed slightly differently each time in Photoshop.

I shot the image in RAW and I post-processed it in Photoshop CS5 by boosting the colors and increasing the sharpening. That was pretty much it for the lower image.

The top image is actually a more complicated version than the bottom image.

What I did was that I produced a duotone image which I then converted back to RGB. I then layered the original lower image over it and combined them to emphasise the dark areas and produce more contrast.

I think that works well around his tail feathers but the edging effect is too strong around the edge of his comb.

Which version do you prefer?

Technical
Nikon D7000 with Nikon 70-300mm lens at 200mm, 1/500th second at f5.3 at ISO 250

Here is an image I am working on, and as you can probably guess, it was originally just one image that I reproduced three times in Photoshop. I also tidied up the background.

Here is the original image so you can compare.

Themes
Meanwhile – as Lance Willett of Automattic said in a theme notification:

“Say hello to The Morning After, a classic and popular magazine-style theme that has withstood the test of time.”

Update
Well The Morning After theme lasted less than 24 hours before it messed up – could no longer see anything on the homepage except one post intro. Played around with it – couldn’t fix it – thought about looking at the forums – can’t be bothered with the hassle – easier to change themes.

Now I am using the Duster theme.

Second Update
I didn’t like the way that Duster renders the very large header area so I have gone back to using the Enterprise theme from Studiopress.

It was a foregone conclusion that when Jean from Cycle Write Blog commented on my snowdrops photograph that it was fun changing themes, I just had to take a look around. The result is that I chose zBench.

I added this CSS to make the typeface bigger and to tone the color of the font down a bit to something a bit less bold than the orginal black.

#maincontent {
font-family:Tahoma, sans-serif;
font-size:14px;
color:#454546;
width:67%;
}

And I also took out the shadow around the title – which I did by changing the color of the shading to white.
#title h1 {
float:left;
text-shadow:1px 1px 1px #fff;
font-size:25px;
margin:0 0 0 10px;
padding:0;
}