My cat Amber.....C&C Please

Here is one of my cat Amber. I'm still learning the DSLR and CS3, so any comments will help. Thank you in advance.

He is a tough subject with that black coat. Really tough.

In the flash pic, big chunks of his face are black without detail.

I posted a shot of the pic that I ran through CS2 in a threshold adjustment layer set to 5,
where 1 is pure black and 255 is pure white. All the black parts are 5 and below and all the white parts are 6 and above.

You have to get more detail into that black part before you bring it to photoshop. There is little to nothing ps can do with that. Even shot in raw, 4 increments from pure black is hard to recover. And its on the subject's face so you can't ignore it.

Try telling the camera to overexpose (eg exposure compensation +1/3) and experiment with your flash off to the side of the camera to get better highlights off of the coat. Too much exposure compensation will blow out the white fur, so the lighting experimentation including using soft window light as an off camera light source, is the ticket, according to me.

Thanks for posting.

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TMCMAN, thank you for the tips. I used your advice and tried it again. Everyone, please let me know what you think as I really want to improve my abilities. Once again, thank you to everyone for your time.

This is much better. The fur has detail in it although the white fur is blown out. If you shot RAW you might be able to bring back some of the white detail. The eyes look a little light to me. I think you could do a separate layer for the eyes and bring the exposure down a little.

You learn quickly, grasshopper.

Now that you know the differences light angle, intensity and exposure comp can make you can work on getting what you see and feel into the finished pic.
This is only the beginning of getting the shot that you think is great.

Increasing dof by closing the shutter would be interesting to get a few more of those wiskers in focus...

Also ditto what Larry wrote. You can, for example, use Adobe Camera Raw to make a second exposure at -1/2 stop, drag it in as a second layer over the original exposure, put a mask filled with black on it, then paint with white in the mask just over the chin whiskers to make the underexposed version show through only in the white fur...

Thanks again Larry and tmcman. I did as you suggested with photoshop and here are the results. Hopefully I'm getting this right. And thank you all again for taking the time to help me. The knowledge all of you have is invaluable.

Man, you're getting better fast