Edit Me Challenge - Week 10

Here we are, at Edit Me Challenge week 10.  I might have to think of a new way to title these challenges, numbering the weeks of the year are making it seem to go by too fast!

This beautiful horse picture was taken by this weeks guest judge, Amy.

Here is what I did to edit this picture:

1) Cloned off the rope, halter, wood pile, shed, utility pole and driveway.

2) Cropped the image.  (Negating my need to clone out so much of the background, but oh well.  A new lesson for next week--find ideal crop, then attack major cloning.)

3) Masked everything but the horse so I could lighten it up a little bit without brightening the entire scene.

4) Used a tool I hadn't used before to adjust luminosity by 50%.  Not entirely sure what it did, but the picture looked brighter and happier after it was done.  :)

5) Applied a B&W effect called MyPhoto to the image in a new layer and then adjusted that layer to 50% transparency.

6) Thought it would look nice with a birch tree border, so I found an image I liked and made it into the border.

Here is the before:

And here is the after: