A 'Tail' of Two Kitties

This #caturday, with apologies to the great writer Charles Dickens, I present 'A Tail of Two Kitties' and another peek at my photo processing.

I began with the following shot of the two cats (they belong to my sister-in-law, but I am caring for them, temporarily). One is an older cat (14 years old) who loves the outdoors and can easily take care of himself out there, so he is sitting on the patio, as seen through the sliding-glass door. The other cat is younger (3 years old) who is very skittish; the only time I have let her outside, she immediately ran and hid under a bush and it took between one and two hours to find her and get her out again, so she only stays indoors now. That is her, in the foreground. She was originally sitting in the exact same pose as the other cat, but turned to look when I got my camera-phone pointed at her.

My preferred photo-editing software is PaintShopPro™, which I've had for maybe 19 years now. It was much cheaper and had more features than PhotoShop™ and similar programs. It came with a "pastel" filter, which rendered the following image when I used it:

I developed my own special photo-processing technique a while back that involves several steps with different filters and blending. I've used it mostly on my Old Barn Project photos recently, but tried it with the original shot of the kitties and got the following results:

Merging the output of the above artistic processing and the prior pastel filter, I arrived at the following 'final' image:

Playing with photo-editing and processing is a fun hobby for me, and has been a stress-reliever for years. It is interesting to see what can be done with photos, and sometimes a 'bad' shot can be reclaimed in some way, which makes it a very worthwhile pursuit! Happy Caturday!