This image is a composite of two different interpretations of the same raw file. One with a cool White Balance to enhance the blues and greens in the sky and foreground grass. The other version is a warm White Balance to enhance the coat of the horse. I outlined the technique for Double Processing a Single Raw File in yesterdays post.
Here is what the raw file looked like after a “compromise” conversion.
And here is the layer stack for the composite. The bottom layer has a warm WB setting made while only paying attention to the horse. The top layer has a cool WB setting made while paying attention to the sky and grass.
In this case the Blend If Sliders would not have worked well to blend these two layers because the tonal range in the house is very close to the tonal range in the grass. (Because the sky is brighter than anything else you could have used the Blend If technique to blend in the sky. But you would be left using a mask to blend in the grass.) So I chose to use a Layer Mask. In this case the Layer Mask was generated using the Quick Selection Tool and was refined using the new CS5 Edge Detection section of the Refine Edge dialog. This tool makes quick work of selecting the hair at the end of the horse’s tail. It also helps smooth out the edges of house so it looks more nature (as opposed to having a cookie cutter look to it).
As a side note all the heavy lifting in terms of the editing for this image was done in Lightroom (could have just as easily been done in ACR). Photoshop was only used to do the compositing.
The shooting meta data for this image is:
D200 with 80-200 f/2.8 lens
1/400 sec @ f/4.5 , ISO 100
Matrix, Aperture Priority, Comp -1/3