Zebra Before Pic

This is a "before" image of a finished piece I recently submitted. Someone asked about the original and it got me curious myself since it had been so long since I'd seen it.

Unfortunately I couldn't find the exact image that I used in that piece, but this is from the same shoot and as close as I could get. So here we see the zebra (who was tossing her head because she knew I was trying to get a nice picture of her) against a dingy and dull background of concrete and dirt zoo enclosure.

So the first thing that I wanted to do was to bring out the zebra by removing the background. A lot of people pick white but for some reason this image just begged for black to me. So you can see the zebra with the removed background here: [link]

Which improves the photo a lot. But you can still see the concrete around the mane fringes and because the zebra is brown and not truly black, she kind of pops out unrealistically from the background and also some of her stripes look faded from the lighting. It was an overcast day but she still had some glare.

So I changed the image to black and white and did some other adjusting and this is the end result: [link]

The photo was taken on a Panasonic DMC-TZ3, my little point & shoot (yes the best camera is the one you have with you) and the image adjustments were made in Photoshop CS3.