It has been another week of culling the files and looking for keepers that I could apply new post processing skills to. I came across this handsome fellow at Arches National Park a few years back and was taken by the morning light shining through his ears. The raw image was pretty bland and didn’t really capture my vision. So it lay dormant for a few years until I finally went to work in the digital darkroom. First I cropped the image to zoom in on the rabbit. Then I brightened it some using a levels adjustment layer in Photoshop. I added a layer and changed it to soft light mode then painted with white at 13% to brighten his eye even more. Then I had to do some edge patrol to get rid of distracting small branches using content-aware fill. Next I took the image into Nik Color Efex Pro where I added a detail extractor level 1 and a Brilliance/Warmth filter with the saturation and warmth backed off from the default. Then I added a darken/lighten center filter with the center on Jack. I was still bothered by distracting highlights especially in the lower left corner so I added a dark vignette and again shifted the center to focus attention on the rabbit. Now I am much happier with the image and it comes close to my memory of that day and has a rightful place in the keeper files.