It's All About the Detail

Ever tried to get a good picture of a creature and all you get is a little face peering from behind some leaves in the distance?  Well, all might not be lost....

My hubby took this photograph at a wonderful golf course in Hilton Head.  The little critter was darting this way and that and to be quite frank we were not close enough.  However, I thought it was such a classic picture of the little fellow I just had to try and do something with it:

The picture was pretty sharp and high resolution but I wanted to try and bring out some of the detail.  The first step was to crop it in close to get rid of all the dead space around it.  Then I used one of my favourite techniques to bring out the detail (see my YouTube video to see now it's done).  I made a copy of the original photograph and applied the pen and ink method:

I then blended this with the original photograph using luminosity.  Next I copied these layers to a new layer, turned off the pen and ink layer and decreased the opacity to 60% to bring back more detail from the original picture.  Finally, I added a frame texture (from Shadowhouse Creations), upped the saturation and changed the levels using adjustment layers.  This is the final result: