I'm going to stay a little bit longer with this image, because it's perfect example, like how powerful can be masks in improving lights and shadows within to start simple. So probably till now if you are not working with masks, or if you haven't seen my other courses, I think I've been using many similar techniques. Maybe you were improving your contrast by just using curves or levels and playing with them that way. And there's nothing wrong about that. Actually, that's quite a good technique. As long as you change blending mode from Normal to luminosity, though it doesn't give you full control you'd like to have.

So let's start wanting and I'm going to create a curve layer and this curve I'm going to call right and let's start With this, and maybe the other one will be shadows. The basic technique I'm actually using is through image and apply image. Why am I going that way, because we have sources on our main folder. And the layers that we actually go into work here will be the merge layer. So it will be the clear represent of the lights and the darks. I'm not sure if it's very clear.

As long as I'm not inverted enough I invert this mask is actually going to change into a shadow area so blank, multiply everything as you open and then just hit OK. Have a look into this mask we created and as you can see it looking exactly as our image but we have wide areas in areas that we actually have highlighted. existant and the darker areas where we have the shadows, how I would work, I'm going to change panic mode to luminosity. And I'll just go up with my curve a little to improve highlights. If I want to work with shadows, I'm going to press Command or Control heat on this layer to make selection and then go into shallow layer, press Command or Control and I saw will apply inverted mask that I had before. It looks like that. And it will be very clear represent for the shadow side just go down.

Maybe I would go up over here to not affect areas I don't want. And once again, I'm going to change blending mode to luminosity. So let's put this two into the group. I'm going to call this contrasts and that's very simple step how you can improve Converse already. Before it'll already have actually quite nice contrast because I was working on this image before and after if we want to add additional punch, if your image is flat that will be the best way of working with that.