Help with this shadow

[bagtagsell]

Hey,
I've finally set up an account here, but I've lurked for a few weeks. Anyway, I took this portrait of my daughter last night and I am really happy with it. However, I was wondering if any of you gurus knew how to copy the shadow so here whole shoulder is in the shadows. The bright left (our left) shoulder is throwing it off just a bit. I've tried various things, but haven't had any success.

[Ziaphra]

I would just minimise it. Here is a quick example...I would actually leave a bit more highlighting over the shoulder as it looks a tad flat at the moment. I duplicated, cloned the bottom layer then set the top layer to luminosity and changed the opacity to suit. The second pic I just lightened the baby's face. Cute baby by the way!

Edit: Here's a 3rd one with the highlight to show you what I mean...

[Daviskw]

Hi there

I also thought keeping some highlighting would look better.

I made a quick feathered selection of the area... added a color sample on the bright and the shade side then matched them with a curves adjustment layer.

Then a little clone tool set to darken and lighten as needed and finally some healing brush tooling.

I compleltely blended but reduced opacity to allow some highlight to show thru.

Butch

[DCobb]

This was my try. I blended the shadow with the healing brush, and tried to brighten the skin tones using the LAB color space.

dc

[bagtagsell]

^ that was awesome...

Can you go into some more details about the healing steps? How is your layer blending?