Good technical tutorials on increasing contrast and masking in Photoshop

[milosh]

Originally Posted by kcoppock

Yeah, it's a very clever application. I feel like there must be a better way of getting the darker intersections without having to duplicate an inverted layer, though.

Heh, one way I used to get selections like that was with Threshold. Horribly black and white selections with no feathering, but I'd add a gaussian blur or something similar. Terrible results, but I'll have to give this a shot.

I also thought about it, it seems stupid that there is a command for selecting the "lights" but there isn't an equivalent command for selecting "darks".

Btw, my most painstaking processing yet was of this image:



first it was three separate raw developments for the three different files. Then stacking the three layers in PS and auto-aligning them, followed by cropping, then auto-blending for focus, then applying all the other adjustments. I ended up going two or three times over the entire tree with the brush, at 200-300% zoom, I guess it took me about 6-8 hours in total.
There must be an easier way.