Mark Hemhauser posted an excellent image of a hand statue. He was trying to get better tones out of the image and I made some suggestions. Mark gave me permission to post the step-by-step process that I followed in making some changes.

Check out Mark's original image HERE.

Click next to view the other images in the process.

Process: For this step, the image was first merged to one layer. This was done by first creating a new layer at the top of the layers palette. The shortcut Control+Shift+Alt+E was used to merge the image all to this new layer while leaving all the other layers intact. Then, the dodge and burn tools were used to increase areas of dark and light. When using the burn tool, it was set to shadows and 10%. I darkened the shadow from the hand, the shadowing on the hand and the lines in the hand, the buildings and trees and also darkened some patches of grass. The dodge tool was set to highlights at 10% and just a few areas on the hand were brightened (not the already existing white highlights but the lighter areas). This step was done rather quickly and the buildings in the background may be a little on the dark side, with fewer details.