Finally, a use for luminosity layers!

So. You've got a screencap that begs to be iconned, but the contrast is very high and you want to bring out the details in the dark, murky areas without the lighter areas becoming blindingly bright. Lowering the contrast doen't always get good results, so recently I've been using a nifty trick involving a luminosity layer. This doesn't seem to feature often in tutorials, so I thought I'd make a tutorial to share the technique with others.

I use Photoshop CS and this tutorial uses selective colour, colour balance and curves, but those are just for my personal colour-tweaking preferences and aren't necessary for the luminosity-based trickery, so the essence of it should be roughly translatable to other programs.

We will be going from to and the tutorial is here.