Boosting Contrast And Color With The Luminosity Mask

Step 2: Copy The Selection Onto A New Layer

First, switch back to your Layers palette. Then with the luminosity selection created, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac) to copy the selected pixels onto a new layer above the Background layer:

To show you what I mean about pixels being only partially selected, click on Background layer's layer visibility icon (the eyeball icon) to temporarily hide it from view so that only "Layer 1" is showing:

With the Background layer hidden, you can see that most of the pixels on "Layer 1" are semi-transparent, and that's because they were only partially selected:

Click once again on the Background layer's layer visibility icon to bring it back into view.

Step 3: Change The Blend Mode For "Layer 1" to "Overlay"

Now that I have the brightest parts of my image on a separate layer, I'm going to use them to boost the color and contrast of my image. To do that, all I need to do is change the layer blend mode of "Layer 1" from "Normal" to Overlay:

If you find that the Overlay blend mode is too intense with your image, try Soft Light instead.

Here's my image after changing the blend mode of "Layer 1" to Overlay. Both the contrast and color have been boosted:

Step 4: Duplicate "Layer 1" If Needed To Boost The Contrast And Color Even More

To increase the contrast and color in my image even further, I'm going to duplicate "Layer 1" using Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac):

With "Layer 1" duplicated, the contrast and color in the image have been increased even further.

If you think your image could use even more of a boost in contrast, simply duplicate the layer once again. Or, if after duplicating "Layer 1", you think the contrast is now a bit too intense, simply lower the opacity value of the duplicate layer until you're happy with the results. I think I've increased my contrast a bit too much at this point, so I'm going to reduce the opacity of my duplicate layer to about 50:

Here's my image after lowering the opacity of the duplicate layer:

My image is now looking a lot better than it did when I started, but there's a small problem. By increasing the contrast, I've lost all the detail in the sky at the top of the image. In fact, the sky now looks almost pure white. I could just leave it like that, since the sky isn't the main subject of the photo anyway, but since it's so easy to bring the sky detail back, I'm going to do that next.