The ultimate in precision

In yesterday’s post, I said the image of the costumed models in a Russian palace was the second most time-consuming and challenging composite I’d done. One of my followers, Fant Smith, asked about the photo that I consider the most challenging of all. Here it is. This is a Gypsy Vanner horse, and I photographed the horse and rider in a corral. The backlighting was beautiful, but the background fencing was unattractive. I therefore made a precise selection of the subjects working at 600% magnification and using the pen tool to select each hair. I know this is obsessive, but if it weren’t done perfectly, it just wouldn’t look good. The individual backlit white hairs of the horse were very fine; they were just a few pixels in width. After I had completed the ultra detailed selection (trying not to encroach into each hair with the selection or else it would disappear in the composite) and added the new background to the horse image, there was a thin dark line from the original background that could still be seen. This was not acceptable. I decided the way to fix that was to use the dodge tool -- also at 600% magnification -- and go around the periphery of the horse and rider again, lightening that dark line on each hair. That did it. Notice the background image, a sunrise shot over the pond in my subdivision. The low-angled light matches the lighting on the subjects. As a finishing touch, I used the Photoshop plugin Flood to create a realistic looking reflection.