I have chosen one of my cat photos and loaded it with Photoshop. I wanted to get rid of the background behind my cat Shyna. I also changed the whole image to black and white because recently Leanne´s Monochrome Madness Challenges and her participants inspired me to experiment. Ok, I must admit that black and white effects have not much of an effect if your subject in the photo is a black and white cat and if you recolored the whole background to black too, but it´s still somewhat interesting.

Here I applied a black and white adjustment layer and a very decent brown gradient map…

And this one here is just changed to black and white, a little less dramatic but not too different…

I shot this image in front of my red curtains and depending where the sun stands, the red curtains will already appear pretty much darker than they usually do. There was a background but not a bright one. I did paint over the background areas with the “color” black on a new layer to get rid of the background. It´s easy but I only had to take care that I don´t paint too much over the cat hair areas for example. Here is the original image that is much different…

Apart from the red curtains, you can also see my arm. Another reason why I wanted to remove or darken the background. This means not every picture is lost because with Photoshop you can do some crazy things to get results you want. It´s a lot of fun and good to get rid of boredom as well.