Dodge and Burn

So I was looking for an image to post recently and came upon this photo in my archives. It was an un-edited HDR straight out of photmatix. Taken in the Black Canyon of the Gunneson in Colorado, it is your typical HDR. Sky was bright, foreground was dark, why not do HDR. The problem with this is that sometimes you get a very flat image with HDR. Sometimes you get a very 3 dimensional image. It's always different. I have this beautiful light on this rock face but its not simple enough. There is too much going on with the rocks and it all looks like its on one plane. 

I wanted to create some separation of this close rock face from the far ones on the right. So I use a little dodging and burning. Now, I personally do not use the dodge/burn tool in photoshop, I use a different method. I will make a copy of the layer I am working on, and fill it with 50% grey. I then change the blending style to "Overlay". You will now be looking at the same picture you had before. Without going into all the details, Overlay basically increases contrast. Now to darken areas, paint with black. To lighten areas, paint with white. Any pixel brighter/darker than 50% grey will be lightened/darkened. This way skips the highlights/midtones/shadows boxes and is easier to use, and I think looks better. It also doesn't keep changing it as you hold the button down, to give you more precise control.

Anyway, brighten the area you want attention on (your eye is drawn to the highlights in an image) and darken the areas around it. Using this method, I made the close rock face more prominent and the right side less so. you can see in the side by side that the bottom half looks more appealing. Now, this isn't an award winning photo but I just wanted one that would show this effect well.