In this example, the avocet chick’s eye and part of its head are in shadow and need to be brightened (Figure 8-66).
First, we create a new Curves adjustment layer and brighten the whole image using the curve shown in Figure 8-67. The result in Figure 8-68 is obviously too bright, but we can fix that as follows:
We select the white layer mask from our new layer and invert it to black using (Figure 8-69).
The black mask prevents the adjustment layer from being brightened, so we work selectively on the mask using a soft brush and the following settings:
Painting color white
Opacity set to 15%
Hardness set to between 0% and 10%.
We make a few soft brush strokes over the dark part of the chick’s face and the darker parts of its body and legs using 15% opacity. You will need to experiment with different opacity values to get a feel for the way this effect works.
Figure 8-70. The chick’s head and parts of its body are now brighter. The corresponding Layers panel is shown above.
A look at the layer mask itself (-click the layer mask thumbnail) reveals the secret of this technique (Figure 8-71) – the brightening effect is only applied where the mask is white.
This is a great multipurpose technique for applying selective adjustments to various types of layers, for example:
A layer containing a sharpened version of an image
A layer containing a reduced-noise version of the image
Hue/Saturation adjustment layers
Curves adjustment layers
We already demonstrated a variant of this method in Blending Layers Using Layer Styles, where we used Overlay blend mode while applying selective adjustments.
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