Forgive my ignorance, but I dont understand half of what you just explained, so I dont know how I could have done it.

I'll tell you what I did though:

- adjusted exposure in LR
- spot adjusted exposure to the dogs face and chest (where a reflector may have added more light had I used one)
- added saturation
- cloned/healed a ROYAL BLUE leash that was in each photo in LR, then finalized in CS3
- added a gaussian blur layer to an already blurred background just to smooth out the areas where the leash was removed

And thats about it. I dont even think I touched the contrast button at all, and none of this was done with actions except for the last step. I have something called 'beauty blur' that addes the gaussian blur, and then I painted out the dog in the mask layer. So there really isn't any soft focus on the dog at all, its all on the background.

I dont think I was shooting directly into the sun as we were under the shade for all of these. The original shots of the yorkie are nice, but shade spots hide the face more than I wanted so I spot adjusted those too.

Thanks for taking the time to explain yourself though. I am totally self taught, what LITTLE I know, so I appreciate the learning aspect of your post.