I'm having a hard time getting a decent picture of my dog and here's why. He's Black. The camera AF won't pick him up very well and the metering gets all screwed up by that as well.

Here's an attempt I made today:


In order to get the image you see before you I made 3 layers - Foreground, background and dog. The foreground got 2 steps of gaussian blur, background got 5 steps of gausian blur I then applied a curve to the dog layer and an opposing curve to the background and foreground layers to bring the blacks in the dog out form the rest of the image.

The post work I did left a halo in certain areas around him so I am trying to avoind that in my next attempt.

Is there a way to get an image of a black object (in this case the dog) without having to do so much post work?

This can be reshot at any time (after all he is my dog lol) so any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I haven't got better than this image in the year I have owned my camera.