Brightening Part of an Image

• Open your image.
  
• Click Windows->Show Layers to make the Layers palette visible.
  
• Click the Create New Adjustment or Fill Layer icon (see below).

• Drag the right-hand slider (see below) to the left until the brightness of the portion you are interested in is acceptable. You can also drag the middle slider to adjust the midtones. It’s best to experiment with all 3 sliders since you can always readjust later as explained below.

• Make sure that the new levels later is the active layer (see below).

• Select the Paintbrush tool.
  
• Make sure that the Paintbrush is in the Normal mode with 100% Opacity (see below).

• Hit the letter D on the keyboard to select the default colors, black and white.
  
• Use the left and right bracket keys on the keyboard to adjust the brush size.
  
• Paint on the Levels layer with black on areas that you do not want to be brightened. If you only want to brighten a small area, it is faster to fill the adjustment layer with black and then paint the small areas with white. In the image below, I wanted to lighten two of the three faces so I painted over them with white. You can see the results in the layer palette below along with the original and adjusted images.

Original Image	Adjusted Image	Adjustment Layer

• If you accidentally paint on an area with too much white, just switch to a black brush and correct it. You can switch from black to white by hitting the X key.

• Note - you can change the Levels adjustment at anytime prior to flattening your image by double-clicking the Adjustment Layer Thumbnail and readjusting the sliders (see below).

• When you are finished, you can use the layer palette menu to flatten your image (see below).