Wish me luck.

I entered the following image to a photo contest:The theme was "Before and After" digital processing. The title of this image is "Cleaning up a dirty horse." The horse on the picture is Bernina and I created this image as a tribute to a wonderful Trakehner mare. The processed image already received a remarkable fifth place of a hundred in a previous competition. The participants come from all over the world and many of them are professional photographers, which makes me get a bit ambitious. You can see the first competition here: http://contests.fotki.com/contests/pblack/
The image was edited using Photoshop 8, which is a pretty basic version of Photoshop, but sufficient for hobby photographers like me. First step was eliminating the background and enhancing color and detail of Bernina's face. To blend out the overexposed flank area, I just added some texture to cover it and softened it by blurring the texture part and making it a little bit more transparent. I hope you like the result ! :-)

Again, clicking on the image will show it full size.