Super-mini PS tutorial (using Shadows & Highlights)

This is so simple and I don't know how I've been editing photos all this time w/o using this feature. Kind of an ah-ha moment (someone call Oprah).

I have 2 black dogs, and they are the hardest things ever to photograph. They end up looking like one large black blob as there is little opportunity for light to reflect. Adjusting the lightness does nothing for the photo. See examples...

Original photo :



Photo with lightness adjusted:

Definately not acceptable. My entire photo is washed out and my puppy is still in blob-like form.

So this is what I've been doing: Images > Adjustments > Shadow/Highlight. At that point I just basically play around with the sliders. Unlike the basic lightness command, which lightens the entire image, the shadow command lightens based on the pixels surrounding the dark shadow.

Pretty cool, eh?

Here's the setting I used for my photo:



And the result:

Hope you will be able to use this :)