I tried to imagine what was the real impression by that time:

acrchallW.jpg (98.23 KiB) Viewed 803 times

Large:
http://www.prestophoto.com/photos/image/900955/21411

Looks good, Michel. Like how you kept the nightness to it. Hey, I made a new word "nightness"

It looks really good, Michel. Ditto what Suzi said.....it was dusky, and you captured it well.

Here is another version - darker and uses a technique where I use the Selection Brush to select the family, do a refine edge to feather it, then create a new layer and use the selection to fill it with black.

Next I do a levels and adjusted for the family brightness. I relabel this layer as Family.

Again do a levels and adjust for the scene brightness (in this case, darkness). I relabel this one to Scene.

Now, turn off every layer, except the black filled layer, do a select all, edit/copy to put the black family layer into the clipboard. I usually paint the corners as i have issues getting it to paste into the correct position and having the four corners painted seems to work.

Now, click on the eyeballs in the levels layers, alt+click on the Layer Mask and Edit/Paste. This puts the blackened family layer in as a layer mask. Click on the other layer and everything snaps to normal. Do the same thing for the other Levels Layer.

Finally, click on the Layer Mask for the Family and do a CTRL+I (i for Invert) and the mask will reverse the Black and White Colours. It is a perfect match because one in the reverse mirror image as it were of the other.

Now you can fiddle with the levels setting and have perfect control of image brightness for the two separate elements of the picture. I did this in CS3, but the techniques work the same in PSE6 or could be mimicked in PSE4/5, etc by using a gaussian blur on the blackened family layer of doing a Select Feather.

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I like this one even better, John. I'll have to try your method tonight on the original cleaned up picture you gave me. I did something similar with the second one I posted, but I only separated out their faces, which left two sets of legs a really ugly, mottled color. Yours looks much better. Back to the drawing board for me, but I'll use your technique this time. Thank you again for all your hard work. I hope you're having fun with this.... It sure has been a big help to me.

Sunny,

Good luck, if you run into issues, give a holler.

One other thing you will find is that you can use the Opacity Slider to give you a lot more control over the lighting for any layer. I was also playing with a dup of the background layer (after denoising) and setting the Blend Mode to Multiply, applying the Mask (easy on CS3 or with a Layer Mask download) and running the opacity down to where it made sense.

I sort of taught myself this and like the control it gives.

One other trick to help out is being on a layer with a Mask and pressing the \ (backslash) key to reveal the mask in red. Press again and it is gonzo!

Thanks, John. I played with it again after work, used your technique and got all the dark, nasties off the legs, then put it in a scrap page. I'm not totally happy with it yet, but I've at least gotten some good techniques out of this little exercise.