[chillin]

Thanks, lurch.

[Littlecoo]

I took a stab at your image with a whole stack of blending layers (with some masking here and there) to give the image a little more punch.

[murck]

My contribution

[ImageReality]

Hi Phyllis,
A simple method is to open this image in Camera RAW.CS3
Browse to the image in Bridge then in File>open in Camera Raw.
Use Fill to hold the shads, adjust blks,you can increase sat, change white Balance.>Then move onto curves.
You will find a great abundance of tools to help improve your images in this area.
People forget or dont even look.

Good Luck

Carl Stevens

[saby]

my suggestion is a gradient in the softlight layer from black to none

[saby]

another one

pseudohdr by qtpfsgui tonemapped with fatal function
color corrected by photoshop

[diggnikon]

Here is my version

i added a layer then chose multiply

then push the colour up in contrast

[diggnikon]

sorry about that - my file was tiny .

the 100 limit killed the decent one

[Kraellin]

i see you've gotten quite a bit of help here, phyllis. good

i'll just throw in that the simplest way, in this image, to bring out the background without altering the helo is to use a contrast/brightness adjustment layer. that's it. that's all you really need. dont adjust the lightness side, just adjust the contrast. i did one set to 0/42 and it looked quite good. this works here because the helo is primarily black with little to have contrasted, so all that apparently changes is the background.

and, if you want a bit more pop to the whole thing, try an S curves in a curves adjustment layer combined with the brightness/contrast layer. i often use these two adjustment layers in sequence to bring some pop to images. it's simple, fast, and adjustable.