My friend Ken Kauppi recently got a wonderful new Canon camera, and has been busily trying it out. He is processing the photos in Photoshop Elements 6 on his Mac, and occasionally sends me emails with some of his results. He sent me two pix of a Monarch butterfly: one bright and cheery, and the other rather dark and mysterious. I couldn't decide which one I liked best, so I got to wondering if I could have the best of both worlds.
He had evidently taken the same same photo, cropped it in two different ways, and then processed each cropped version in a different way, one emphasizing the butterfly color, the other emphasizing the butterly and its relation to the plants.
Here's the dark and mysterious jpeg, but while I wanted the butterfly in its world, I also wanted it brighter, like the other butterfly. So I opened the jpeg he had sent me and did a very careful selection of just the butterfly, copied and put it on its own layer (top or Layer 1), and then did a Levels adjustment on the butterfly layer. I tried simply clicking the Auto button and that worked just fine. I always go ahead and open the Levels dialog, even though I first try Auto (for which there is a menu item), then if the Auto doesn't work you can Reset and try the eyedropper tools.
The desaturation applied to the background layer.
Because of the vignetting effect Ken had used, which concentrated the lighting in the center rather than on the butterfly, I felt things still weren't quite right for what I wanted. So I made a new layer, between the original and the enhanced butterfly, then drew an ellipse around the butterfly, feathered the edge, and filled the rest of the layer with a mid-value neutral gray. I discovered that changing the mode from Normal to Saturation, with an opacity of 50%, toned things down and made it seem that the light spilled diagonally upwards from the butterfly.
The finished brighter butterfly in its mysterious world. So here are three different pictures from exactly the same photograph. The differences come from just how you choose to process the photo--you can get many effects, which one you use depends on what it is you want to accomplish with your photograph.
Turning on the enhanced butterfly, I discovered that in Normal mode and 100% opacity it was much too bright for its mysterious world. So I changed from Normal to Lighten, then started dragging the Opacity down until the butterfly was brighter, but not too bright for everything else. I ended up at 68%--the ability to adjust just the butterfly in several different ways is why I put it on its own layer rather than selecting it and adjusting it in situ in the Background layer.