To increase the density and detail in highlight areas, you can create a mask by using Select/Color Range/Highlights or Select/Color Range/Sampled Colors, or by creating a Quick Mask.
Once you have the area you want to work on on its own layer, select Linear Burn as the Blending Mode (rather than Multipy which many folks currently use for the same purpose). In most cases, you will need to reduce the opacity to taste. When using Liinear Burn, the whites looked really, really good with detail and without the dreaded muddy/grey look.
The optimized image is above.
BIRDS AS ART Blog: great info and lessons, lots of images with our legendary BAA educational Captions; we will not sell you junk. 30+ years of long lens experience/e-mail with gear questions.
BIRDS AS ART Online Store: we will not sell you junk. 35 years of long lens experience. Please e-mail with gear questions.
Check out the new SONY e-Guide and videos that I did with Patrick Sparkman here. Ten percent discount for BPN members,
This is the image after the major clean-up work with Quick Masks, the Patch Tool, and the Clone Stamp but before the Linear Burn of the highlights.
Note that the whites in the optimized image in the pane above still look white!
You can learn the advancd Quick Masking on Robert O'Toole's APTATS CD. The complete BAA workflow is contained in the Digital Basics PDF. Details can be found on the home page.
BIRDS AS ART Blog: great info and lessons, lots of images with our legendary BAA educational Captions; we will not sell you junk. 30+ years of long lens experience/e-mail with gear questions.
BIRDS AS ART Online Store: we will not sell you junk. 35 years of long lens experience. Please e-mail with gear questions.
Check out the new SONY e-Guide and videos that I did with Patrick Sparkman here. Ten percent discount for BPN members,
That's cool, I just posted a landscape critique where I told someone to use linear burn. I selected highlights in that case using CTRL - ALT - ~ (tilde). Then I went back to the main forums menu and saw this.