Eric:
I noticed you did an exceptionally good job of extracting the foreground. Nice job on preserving the hair detail at the edges and especially on , bringing out the detail around the left (as you look at the pic) eye, which is buried by shadows in the original.
Thanks, too, for sharing your steps. Always appreciate it when people are nice enough privide the level of detail you did.
When you say "Posterized slightly," does that mean using Image > Adjust > Posterize (or Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Posterize) or the Poster Edges filter? Do you recall "number of levels" [for Posterize] or Poster Edges settings]?
She's such a pretty dog I wanted to see if I could come up with a version that retained the color of her coat. This was done by knocking her out from the BG (not nearly as well as you did), followed by running an action ("Brad's sketch") from this collection (
click HERE). I ungrouped the Levels adjustment layer so it applied to the entire image, not just a single layer.
To add a little more color, I duplicated the original BG layer, pulled it to the top of the layer stack and set the opacity to 50%.
In any event, your rendition of Jewel is very compelling. Hope you continue to post your pics and share your methods with us.
~DannyR~