All Natural?

Photoshop can help adjust lighting in photographs to make them look more natural. For this photograph I took a picture of my dog Zoro. He is an Australian Cattle Dog (Blue Heeler). The first photograph is the altered photograph. The second photograph is the original photograph. I chose to crop the photograph to bring Zoro to the front of the picture and lose the extraneous objects in the background (the wood floor and rug). I made several adjustments to the lighting. I increased the brightness and the contrast. Also, I used the "magic wand" to select the rug and change the contrast and brightness. The original photograph dulled the rug and it had an orangish yellow tint to it. So by manually selecting the outer parts of the photograph I was able to adjust the colors to their "normal" colors. Levels were used to adjust the mid-tones and whites. There were too many highlights in the original, as some areas of Zoro's fur appeared white, when they are really a sandy brown. Photoshop can help create an image that is more natural by changing colors, and making it more appealing by cropping out extraneous information.