Jenn - A Child's Playground
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liflander - go with your shadow
nightpixels - Connected by its Shadow
Miskatonic_university - Concrete Angel
Martina McBride - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrPqZI_QTV8
By David Rosenthal.

In this tutorial we're going to cover what to do when you've got a wide range of tonal values from dark shadows to bright highlights in a single image. You can read about using Shadow/Highlights recovery here, and it's a great tool. But what if you could pull all of those tonal values out of one image, and not even need to use Shadow/Highlights?

Well, if you shot in RAW, then you're in luck, because RAW will give you the power to process out two different exposures, one for the shadows and one for the highlights. Once you have those two exposures you can easily blend them. I'm going to show you how.

This image here (coutesy of wxwax), is a great example of the challenge faced when the range of the scene is beyond the digital sensor to capture in one exposure. I've set the exposure and shadows slider in ACR to their maximum, in order to not clip either of them. The result is what you see here. We can do better.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE A LARGER VERSION.
After doing some more work with curves and masks, I ended up here.

You can ask questions or discuss this technique on Digital Grin.
Here is the blended image. A nice starting point.
So, I went back to my RAW converter (Adobe Camera RAW) and made two wildly different exposures from them. Here is the one that I exposed for the highlights.
And here is the one that I exposed for the shadows.

What you need to do is to get the two images in one PS document, with the lighter one on top. There are several ways to do this. You can copy/paste, or cmd-shift-drag on the Mac (cntl-shift-drag on the PC). However you do it, get the lighter exposure on top of the darker one.
Jenn - A Child's Playground
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EXIF EXIF" href="javascript:openLB(1713953427,'',XLarge,'',947,768);">Jenn - A Child's Playground
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Jenn - A Child's Playground
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See photo in original gallery.