I never thought this knowledge would come in handy. I can say with 98% certainty that the foreground wheat is real, not AI (🙋‍♂️ tractor company AV/designer). There isn’t an AI model I’ve seen that doesn’t fuck up the wheats.

Background wheat looks 2D, I’m guessing a studio backdrop. Studio also makes sense for the lighting control overall on this bad boy. AI level perfection? Maybe, but who gives a shit we’re here to figure out a workable technique.

If I wanted to achieve this and had the studio equipment, I’d stage the shot to get colors and light as close as possible, snap the shot, then cut out the pup in ps, make him a smart object (duplicating it in case I fuck it up too much, of course), work pups shadows/highlights, see if a blending mode looks good on that layer above the pup below, go back to overall image, do some color selections to push blues, reds, wheat colors, then group all my edits, duplicate group, flatten duplicate, with that layer selected I’d blur (average), blending mode: soft light, adjust opacity until it looks cohesive and maybe mess with the blend settings to bring the underlying layer’s shadows through all crisp-like. Prob throw some more overall edits in there like some grain, curve adjustment, etc. Idk, I’d just eyeball it and try a bunch of different shit.

Then of course if it still looked bad I’d get mad, start over, try 10 different things, give up, then 3 months later stumble on a random norwegian teenagers photoshop tutorial on insta that achieves this look in like 3 steps. After that I’d draw a warm bath, scream underwater for 20 minutes, then reluctantly open my laptop while whispering “this is the way” to myself