Cheeta- Oil Painting Portrait.

Hi Folks;

Gina & her sister visited Kenya, Africa in 2004, and with her Olympus C770 UZ 10x digicam came home with about 50 good photos that are still getting regular hits on Webshots, about 40,000 + so far. I cropped the head off one of her Cheeta's, opened it in CS5, enlarged it, pressed Ctrl+J for a duplicate layer, clicked Filters>Pixel Bender>Oil Painting and used what I think are the most natural settings for furry animals & feathered birds Stylization, 7.862, Cleanliness 7.005, Colorization 1.06, Brushscale 1.387, brushcontrast 1, >OK Then I clicked Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur> 11 Px. Then I clicked Layer Mask Icon at bottom of Layer window. Pressed "D" for default color picker Black FG White BG (To reverse press "X").
Using paint brush & black I painted over Cheeta to reveal it on a plain beige BG. If I painted over Cheeta, I changed to White to replace the untidiness. Wasn't too pleased with the plain BG, so I took it into free fotosketcher and gave it a painterly BG.

Comments welcome & always very much appreciated

Warm hugs

Gus

Hi Gus, I love your painterly-looking images, and this is no exception!! I even like the contrast, which accentuates the strong directional low light from the left. Might want to consider fixing up the repeating element just in front the the cat's eyebrow area.

Great work!!

Wow, what pop! I really like that you fancied up the BG because it plays well against the texture of the fur. If this were mine I might look at sharpening the eye and the tip of the nose and/or ears just a tiny bit to give the eye a really good place to drop down on.

Great looking cheetah portrait, Gus. You did a great job combining the different filters to get a great painterly effect. Nice warm coloring. Good suggestions above, nice work!

Gus, Beautiful base image and a great job with the filter. I agree w/ the very good suggestions by Scott and Jules.:S3:

Nice image and application ... as usual Gus. :w3

Like the feel of the texture in the BG. Nice...

Very nice processing of this one Gus, love the painterly look to it!