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Easy HDR Brighten Shadows Darken Highlights

I have seen a number of ways to get the "High Dynamic Range" effect, where you want to bring up the detail in the shadows, without blowing out the highlights, but they all seemed quite complicated - and I think I have now found a nice easy way to do this.

I started with a photo which was almost a silhouette:

1. Duplicate the layer
2. Add a 'threshold' adjustment layer, adjust the threshold level until the shadow areas are all black, and the highlight areas all white
3. Use Layer / Merge Down to combine the threshhold with the copy layer
4. Use Levels to invert this layer
5. Apply a little bit of gaussian blur, say around 2 pixels
6. Change the layer's mode to 'soft light'

You can then adjust the effect further by painting parts of the layer black or white to change the areas affected, or change the layer's opacity to control the strength of the effect, or use the 'levels' adjustment on the mask layer to separately control the effect on the highlights and shadows.

Here's the result:

See this thread on flickr for further comments on this technique