I was test shooting my recently IR-converted K-5 (for the interested: sensor IR-blocking filter replaced by 630Nm infrared filter) and came across a field with some horses and a lot of background shrubs and trees against this rather cloudy and moody sky.

After having converted one of the raws in this series with a straight-on RB channel swap, I kept being drawn back to this single horse which was not in a strong position originally, composition-wise.

I mirrored the image and cropped to a very rough rule of thirds approximation and then applied a somewhat dreamy filter to the whole image. To emphasize the dream effect, I wanted to leave the horse as sharp as possible and untouched by the filter so I cut it out of the original layer and repositioned it as top layer.

A last bit of adjustment to emphasize contrast and detail and this dreamy image was done. I could actually have imagined this would have been a unicorn but it did look exactly the way I intended it: unreal.

[MikeNArk]

Very good work in creation of this image. It is a brilliant image with great contrast. I couldn't begin to do this kind of image processing. Thanks much for sharing this work. You should be happy with the outcome.

[angkymac]

Quite an interesting shot!
Moreover, the description of the processing is even more interesting!
Great work.
Angky.