Kind of a selective coloring with Photoshop

I thought I'd write a little insight to my post-processing work behind my latest horse fair photos. Really simple playing with the masks and it's kind of a selective coloring without turning the background totally black and white. 

All the pictures can be viewed larger. Here we go!

The original photo

I started off by reducing noise (Filter > Noise > Reduce noise > 10/0/100/0) in the background. I used a layer mask so that I could only have the reduction in the background area. The filter reduced too much of the details of the horse and I didn't want that.

After that I used a premade color toning action to make the image a little more interesting (at least in my opinion). But as you can see, the action leaves the area around the horse's eye a little too dark so...

My imaginary friend thinks you have some serious problems.

I've been PPing my photos for over an hour now and this is what I got today:

Actually I used 6 different post processing programs when editing these; Windows Live Photo Gallery, Microsoft Office Picture Manager, FrameFun, FotoFlexer, Picasa 3 & Gimp. Kind of a drag but still had fun 'cos I had a clear visions of the things I wanted to do.

Collages are so much fun to do and I might go a bit over-board with them now and especially in the future, but I can't help myself. :D

Spidey

I was just fooling around with a couple of spired photos I took last summer with my dad's Sony DSLR Alpha 100.

I've almost reached the 100 MB per month uploading limit in Flickr. So I guess, if I happen to get some good photos during these 10 days or so, I'll be posting them here.
And when I reach the 200 picture limit in Flickr, I'm gonna have to delete some pictures from there, unfortunately. I don't have Visa or any other card with which I could pay for the pro-account so I'm just gonna have to bear with it.
Oh well, I only have 55 pictures there now so that time won't probably come anytime soon.

Victory!!

I found this Gimp-tutorial and managed to make this

and this


I'm quite proud of myself right now. I thought I was totally useless when it came to this kind of stuff...But I'm not!