I recently attempted a very challenging edit and I thought I’d share the before and after.

First, let me just say thank you to Courtney, the dog trainer who is my friend and helps me a lot as my photography assistant. If you need a trainer, look up Steadfast Dog Training.

We were trying to get a photo of both of the dogs in the boat. This was a challenge for lots of reasons:

1. Putting one dog in a boat and getting him to pose is hard. Getting TWO dogs to pose was almost impossible.

2. The boat would move and that made the dogs nervous.

3. The dogs needed to be leashed up so that Courtney could direct them. Otherwise they would’ve both just jumped out of the boat.

4. It was very hot and humid so there was a lot of panting going on.

If we got one dog to pose, the other one wasn’t in place. So not only was getting the dogs to pose a challenge, the background is very detailed and that made the editing process really hard.

I started the edit with removing the leashes. Normally when I’m photographing a dog that has a leash on (which is about 85% of the dogs I photograph), I give the handler specific instructions on how to hold the leash.

Courtney has helped me so many times she knows exactly what to do and how to hold the leashes but when you’re dealing with two dogs, sometimes things don’t work out as planned.

Normally, she’d hold the leashes up and away from the dogs and step back as far away as she can. She did that but then the dogs moved.

This is the best photo of both of the dogs posing so I went to work on editing.

If you look closely at the original photo, the leashes around both dogs necks are problematic when it comes to editing them out of the shot. The leash is right behind the grey dog’s ear. His name is Jarvis. Having the leash right up against the outline of his ear is never a good thing and the tab on the other leash wasn’t in a good spot either.

This final photo is what’s called a composite. I took parts of other photos and edited them into the original photo.

Because of where Courtney is standing, the boat and the grass were really tricky to fix. LIKE REALLY TRICKY.

This might be the only ‘two dogs in this boat photo’ I attempt.

Want to guess how much time it took me to edit this? I started once and totally scrapped that attempt before starting over a 2nd time.

I’m not complaining…. it’s rewarding to see how far my Photoshop skills have come and what I’m actually able to do. But I’m not sure I want to do it again.. with two dogs. LOL! I’ll do one dog shots in the boat again for sure.

So here’s a really detailed before and after edit. I’ll post more of these since most of the dogs I photograph are on leash but I edit the leash out.