Brightening certain areas of a photo

[TBCobra]

I am hoping someone could tell me how to brighten certain areas of photos instead of the whole thing at once. Here is an example:


The original was a little on the dull side. After some adjustments I made it look like this but the bottom left corner is on the dark side while the upper right is too bright. How I can adjust these areas alone without affecting the whole thing?

 

[besmirched]

Afaik when something is white or nearly white it is over blown and missing information and the same goes the other way with black. So to adjust something is not easy... well for me but hey there are some cluey people in this forum so I too may find an answer later in this thread.

I tackled the overblown side by copying the dark half of the car to a new layer and then transform to flip the layer horizontally, then used guides to line up the layer across, masked the layer and painted over the mask to reveal dark copied layer over the bright bits.

edit... not sure why I only copied 1/2 of layer, shouldve copied entire layer and fliped it to mask both sides at once. oh well I'm going to keep quiet for a bit now.

 

[TBCobra]

Thanks for the reply. Being new a lot of this is still over my head. I guess I was hoping there was an easier solution. lol

 

[chitkaran]

Well if you want to get it to simplest form, you can use Dodge tool to some extent.

Alternatively, you can select the specific area and copy to a new layer -> Adjust the brightness to your taste -> reduce opacity if needed to make it blend to the original image.

 

[3headcat]

Everything is doable if you got time and nerves but that will require some photo manipulation not just photo editing skills. You can dodge and burn where required, copy right side of the photo and paste it it to the left one to get some details and remove unnecessary one with soft eraser, close some of the ground to bring some data to the black empty part , paste a new sky from different photo etc..
My advice? Take another photo under different lighting conditions (consider HDR) it will take lest time and stress and the results will be much better

Or give us the original “dull” one and we see what we can do ;]