Cropping Pet Photographs for Commissions

Gabriele's sent me a couple of pictures of two dogs that she's got commissions for and it's very interesting because she wants to put the two dogs in one picture.Prefer to listen to Colin's advice? Click the play button below:Now this is always a problem. It's even more of a problem because what we've got to do is trim the animals down. Now if we look at the light coloured animal here (lighter of the two) the way you got to do this is to cut the head off first of all but you can't come too tight.You still have to give it a fair bit of depth in the neck and the body. So what I suggest we do here is to follow the line. If you look at the left ear that's the lower of the two and come from the edge where you see the body come to. Now I have given you a screen shot of this and an edited screen shot of this and also we're going to give you the complete pictures so you can see where I'm putting my line effectively.I'm certainly not suggesting we cut the ear off here stays there but we use the line that I've got at the edge of that crop as they edge to we need to use. We'll also have to lose the area that you can see the body through the ear and the head if you see that little bit by the ear. We'll have to lose that as well that'll have to go into the background. Now having done that what you've got to do then is you can't just leave the head as it is because it look as though you just chopped the head off. So you got to use it is as a fog or a misty look. And to do this you've got to put a background on there's no option. I've done this many many times so you should be able to see that on other pictures that I've done and that will appear on the left hand side of the two picture animal.Right now we go to the other one that's much much easier.What we've got there is we got a complete animal and all we have to do really if you look at the other ear the right side of the ear and right in the middle you've got the front part of the dog. If you loose the back part of the dog completely once again you've got a good image and you can use that but that's the easy one. It's not going to be easy, this is a really hard thing to do I've done it myself on occasions when I've had commission work and it's always presented me with a problem and it's even worse if you get two different photographs taken at different times.We're lucky here that these were taken at the same time so the lighting is correct. Now I hope it makes sense to you all. It's going to be as I said really difficult to do and I don't envy Gabrielle the job of doing it but I think you all understand where I'm coming from and you can all if ever you get this yourself in any commission situation you know how to tackle it.Good luck.[fusion_alert type="success" accent_color="#808080" background_color="#ffffff" border_size="" icon="" box_shadow="" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" id="" animation_type="bounce" animation_direction="left" animation_speed="0.3" animation_offset=""]To receive advice on your work and get access to Colins courses join our membership for as little as $5.[/fusion_alert]Update: See Gabriele's part finished picture where Colin offers advice on the background, click here.