Getting Buzzed with the Kitties

I took this photo on Easter Sunday, as my kitties slept together with dreams of catching a glimpse of the Easter Bunny (thankfully for the Bunny, she came and went while they slept). I found them curled up together as I came downstairs and had to quietly slip by, grab a camera, pop up the built-in flash and grab a few quick shots. The original is fine (though there's a bit of clutter behind them that I can paint out if I want), but I ran this through a Photoshop plug-in filter called Buzz-X that was made by a British company that no longer exists. It's too bad that the filter is no longer made (and I think the company has gone out of business completely) because it was a great simplification filter--easy to use, had great creative effects and was quite popular. I even tried to buy the rights to the software at one point, so that I could market it in the United States, but was unable to even locate the owner. A company called Topaz Labs makes a similar filter, but I haven't tried it yet (it requires a PC or an Intel Mac and I don't have either). If you've done any shots using their simplification filter, let me know and I'll post one (or a few) on the blog. Using Buzz is incredibly simple, you just adjust the inner, outer and middle portions of the image while watching the results more or less live and then when you see what you want, tell it to process. It takes just a few minutes. I'm sure the Topaz product is probably just as easy to use. (By the way, the orange thing in the front right is the pet fox that they often sleep with--your pets need pets, too.)

Photo notes: Shot with a Nikon D90 with a 70-300mm Nikkor zoom lens; ISO 200, in the night-portrait mode. Exposed for 1/60 sec., at f/5.6. Recorded in both RAW and JPEG simultaneously.