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Step 5. INVERSE THE SELECTION, THEN USE LEVELS' RIGHT OUTPUT SLIDER TO DARKEN THE BACKGROUND
Now that your soft-edged light beam selection is in place, you're going to do two things: (1) darken the areas surrounding the beam, and (2) lighten the area inside the beam. Let's start on the surrounding areas first, so you'll need to Inverse your selection by pressing Command-Shift-I (PC: Control-Shift-I). Then press Command-L (PC: Control-L) to open Levels, and drag the bottom-right Output Levels slider to the left (as shown) to darken the surrounding areas. Drag it farther than you think you need to, because you'll be able to adjust it later on. Click OK to apply the darkening
Step 6. INVERSE THE SELECTION AGAIN, THEN USE LEVELS' LEFT OUTPUT SLIDER TO BRIGHTEN THE BEAM
Now, let's do the beam itself. You'll have to Inverse the selection again, so press Command-Shift-I (PC: Control-Shift-I) again. By the way, the reason we do the darkening first is just because it's easier to see the effect that way, because of the contrast it creates. Now that you've inversed the selection, bring up Levels again, but this time drag the bottom-left Output Levels slider to the right to lighten up the beam. Again, lighten it up more than you think you need to, and then click OK. Press Command-D (PC: Control-D) to Deselect your beam.
Step 7. ADD A LAYER MASK TO YOUR BEAM LAYER
You could now just call it "done" at this point with the beam going directly over your subject, and depending on the photo, you might want to do just that. However, if you'd prefer to have the light beam just fall on the wall behind her, then we can put that duplicate layer to use now. Click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers palette (as shown here). The mask is completely white, so nothing changes on the layer, right? (I knowyou know.)
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