Free PS Elements: Project St Imre Part III (selective lightness) in Elements

1.Load the photo
In the past few weeks, we have already fiddled a couple of times with this photo, but there is still a lot to do about it. For now, let's take on the burnout of the sunlit areas. You can easily spot these detailless, white parts on the left of the statue. We'll try to reduce the burnout and see if there's anything left in these areas. You have a better chance with photos taken with a dSLR camera.

2. Make it double
First of all, click Layer/Duplicate Layer to duplicate the Background layer, and on the Background Copy layer, set the blending mode from Normal to Luminosity.

We only modify the burnout on the upper layer, and the Luminosity blending mode will make sure that only lightness values change, colors don't.

3. Take back the highlights
You should stay on the upper layer copy. Click Enhance/Adjust Lighting/Shadows/Highlights. This feature, taken over from Photoshop, adjusts certain specified lightness intervals. This means you can specify different lightness values for shadows and highlights.

The Lighten Shadows slider can be used to make dark areas lighter. We won't be needing this tool now, so set it to 0%. This time, Darken Highlights is much more important. Increase this value until the details appear on the burnt out areas. We used a value of 100%, and even applied the feature again with the same settings.

It doesn't matter if you slightly overdo the darkening as the Opacity for the Background Copy layer can be decreased to refine the darkening effect.

4. The poor man's masker
The darkening may have made the picture a bit too flat. The midtones also got darker, which damages the plasticity of the photo. We have to restore the original state to the areas which didn't need darkening but still got changed.

Unfortunately, Photoshop Elements doesn't contain a History Brush tool or a masking feature. But simply erasing the unneeded parts of the picture from the upper layer and leaving only the repaired areas gives a surprisingly good result.

Choose a smaller, soft eraser about 20-30 pixels in size, and use a great deal of zoom. Take care not to erase the freshly repaired areas. For other parts of the picture, you can use much larger erasers (of even several hundred pixels) for faster work. As you can see in the image above, there are only small bits left of the upper layer. We erased almost the whole picture, save for the formerly burnt out areas, now nicely repaired.

5. Details have appeared
Finally, click Layer/Flatten Image to merge the layers.

The left side of the picture above shows the original state, and the right side the one after the changes. I think we've done a nice job as the details have really appeared in the burnt out places, and the other areas of the picture remained unchanged.