Had the pleasure of helping Amy horsesit Dr. Suzanne Duncan’s two horses, the mare Grace, and her new foal Liberty Belle. I took a few pictures of them, but I wasn’t satisfied with how they came out. Enter Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop, and Photomatix Pro.

Here is the final product (click to see it bigger):

But this is what it looked like straight out of the camera:

I used Lightroom and Photoshop to convert the Raw file to a 16-bit TIFF file, sharpen it slightly, and adjust the contrast. This represents my usual workflow with a Raw file out of the camera. This made it look like this:

I then used Lightroom to create five separate versions of the picture, adjusting the exposure up and down 2 stops:

I exported these five files into Photomatix Pro and used this to tonemap the picture into an high dynamic range or HDR image:

This looked interesting, but I wasn’t satisfied with how the sky looked. So I open this back up in Photoshop, applied a gradual mask to the background and used a Color EFx Pro filter to add the illusion of fog to the sky, resulting in the final picture you see above.

Sounds like a lot of work to salvage what is still a mediocre image, but it was a fun exercise in creativity.