I must admit that I am more of a photographer than an image editor. I come from shooting slide film. Nothing could be corrected or fixed after the development of the film. Many people process images using luminosity masks today. Luminosity masks are masks made by brightness not color. The masks are already feathered. So if you want to just impact the brightest parts of an image you simply select the brightest mask and do what you want to do. What you did will only impact the brightest parts leaving other brightnesses untouched. I have wanted to learn using luminosity masks for some time now. 

          I looked at Tony Kuyper's luminosity masks. His masks are wonderful and very well priced. Yet, I never took the plunge because one look at his action pallet had me petrified. I was not in the mood to get another Ph.D. to learn how to use this pallet nor did I have the time to devote to learning how to use this system. I understand now that it really is a bit simpler than it looks.

          One day I stumbled upon Jimmy McIntyre's free easy panel. I like free! I like easy! I downloaded it and watched a short tutorial. Wow! What have I been missing all this time. After using this panel now for a month or so I am no longer intimidated by the other luminosity masks out there. By the way, Jimmy has a more advanced panel for sale if that interests you and of course Tony's panel is one of the best.

          So what are luminosity masks used for? Let's look at this image below:

You have very dark parts in this image (dark trees) and you have very light parts in the image (brightest clouds). Graduated neutral density filters would not have helped here. This image comes from the same single raw file. It was developed first for the image without considering the brightest clouds. Then I developed the same raw file for the clouds. I layered both files in Photoshop and used the panel to select and feather just the brightest sections of the image. By painting on the mask it combines the best parts of both images without spending hours to do anything manually. Your painting strokes will only affect the brightest parts of that layer. Without luminosity masks your painting affects any area you paint over - no more, you can now affect only certain brightnesses if you want to. How awesome is that?

          You can download the free panel here:

http://www.throughstrangelenses.com/easy-panel-download-for-photoshop/

          I have really enjoyed editing images using this panel and it makes many tasks easy. Give it a try.