awww, everybody's got that one special toy they don't want anybody else to touch.
great use of desat here. only critique would be to make sure you lower the pixel size of your brush and zoom in on the image to do all edging first, then use a bigger brush to restore the middle with no worry of bleed-over. you restored colour to the area between the bears head and leg.
One of my favorite type of newspaper assignments is to capture "wild art", which is defined as "Stand-Alone, Feature Shot, Enterprise art are found moments that are intended to be realistic slices of everyday life" (definition taken from this glossary). These are typically images that caption themselves, not needing a lot of words to get their point across. For this challenge, I'm scoring images as whether I'd like to see them on the front page of a paper as feel good wild art. If I don't think they would make the paper, I'm then asking myself, "does it make me feel good?" If it doesn't do much for me, well then, oh well...
Sorry, but this just doesn't do anything for me. I don't like the processing. I'm sure this is a cute dog, but there's no "feel good" buzz about the image. If a dog or cat is shy, just be patient...sooner or later they all yawn or stick out their tongues.
selective destat :( even worse the masking is off i can see the cushions colours coming through, be better if youd toned the blue down to a very pale blue, it would have been nice to see the dogs eyes as well