Digital Manipulation - Minky

I took this shot of Minky my cat outside in the garden during October last year.  Though I liked the image, I thought the background was a bit distracting and so used the image as an overlay of 2 images as part of a task in my Level 1 work.  Now I have come back to the original image for  Level 2, I have deleted the distracting background and tweaked the brightness/contrast controls in photoshop:-

                                                                       Wild Minky
                                   aperture f5.6 shutter 1/3200 iso 800 focal length 90mm

I used the clone tool to make the background completely black,  by using quite a large heavy brush, because I was covering a large black area. I clicked on the top right of the image, to pick up the black colour on the brush, then proceeded to  brush over the coloured background, top left. As I worked I switched to a smaller brush when getting lower and near to the cats outline, so that I did not mix, or catch the cats colours on the brush.

I have given the image a full black background to make Minky look more dramatic. I had prepared by going into the garden with my camera and watched and waited until Minky was doing his own thing. He laid down and was reaching over to groom his fur.  He has a  trait of stopping mid way and just  gazing, so here I seized the moment.  With his fixed look and colours he emulates a wild cat to me, though in reality he is very soft and loveable.  I got in as close as was comfortable, on his level, without making him turn to look at me and with the camera set to aperture priority because I had to be quick, and I only wanted him in focus,  I ran off this image, among others.  The daylight was good I thought, coming from the left behind me, it seemed to be shining on and highlighting his facial features well.
I consider the manipulated image to be big improvement on the original.

I had taken the original image in file format 'jpeg' and presented it on my blog.