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Selective Correction with Adjustment Layers and Masks

From Sue Chastain,
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Save the original photo

The original photo
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Ulla Hennig, a forum member, posted this photo of the village of Mittenwald in the Bavarian Alps along with the question: "As you can see, the right half of the photo is quite dark, although I like the sky and the clouds. Are there any ways to keep that as it is and to light up the houses on the right hand side?"

Ordinarily, I'd have suggested the highlight/shadows features which is available in Photoshop CS and Photoshop Elements 3.0, but Ulla only has Photoshop 5.5 to work with. For this tutorial, I'm going to show you both the shadow/highlights method, and another method using adjustment layers and a selection mask. I'm using Photoshop Elements 3.0 in my screen shots, but you can use any version of Photoshop from 5 up or any version of Photoshop Elements.

To follow along with me, right click the original image above and save it to your computer, then open it in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

  1. Save the original photo
  2. Select the buildings with the polygonal lasso tool
  3. Shadow/Highlights in Photoshop CS and Elements 3
  4. Add a Levels adjustment layer
  5. Reduce the mid-tones
  6. About the layer mask
  7. Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer
  8. Save the finished file

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