Many composers these days trained with the orchestration textbooks by Samuel Adler

(himself an accomplished composer) or Alfred Blatter (among others); two classic

texts on orchestration by famous composers of the past are those by Hector Berlioz
and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. An important earlier source on writing for different
instruments was the "Syntagma Musicum" of early 17th-century composer Michael
Praetorius. � Andrew Cashner Jul 17 '15 at 16:23

In his memoirs Berlioz gives the impression that he wrote music in some kind of
ecstatic trance of inspiration; but the Symphonie fantastique, for example,
features two harp parts, and writing well for harp requires you to know the harp's
elaborate pedal mechanism. If you get a sheet of big orchestral staff paper you'll
find that even just drawing in all the bar lines takes some time, and then there
are all the transpositions for brass and wind instruments in different keys. This
takes practice and depends on disciplined study of music by other composers. �
Andrew Cashner Jul 17 '15 at 16:31