I photographed these two stallions during my White Horses of the Camargue photo tour in southern France. The original picture included their entire bodies plus the ground and some of the environment. The position of their heads made the shot, so I cropped this down to 10 megabytes -- a significant reduction in pixels -- to eliminate everything except the dynamic action. I then used Topaz AI Gigapixel to increase the resolution up to 160 megabytes followed by Sharpen AI, also by Topaz. The original sky was a bland, white-ish backdrop. To add a new background, I used ‘Select and Mask’ in Photoshop plus the refine edge brush to make a surprisingly good selection of the horses and their manes. I then added the storm clouds for drama and depth. I shot this with a 100-400m lens, and that means the background sky would never have been sharp. Notice how the new sky adds such a dynamic quality to the image, especially because it's sharply defined. My camera settings were 1/1250, f/6.3, and 400 ISO.
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