well, Marlene...i gotta tell ya, this was a hard image for me to work with. i couldn't do much about the highlights. when i tried to reduce them the regular way (shadows/midtones/highlights), it just didn't work. anyway, here's the color version and my steps in PSP. not sure that this is any better than your original. perhaps the way you did it in the first place is better than with the postwork i did. but here are my steps anyway. 1. crop (that was kemal's idea BTW. i was gonna crop it the way i suggested but decided to show you his version...just as another alternative). 2. curves adjustment (input 48; output 74) 3. bumped up the contrast to 7. 4. then i went to edit and copied the image. 5. then i undid everything i did except for the crop. 6. next, i went to layers and promoted the cropped image to a layer. 7. go to edit, and then paste as a new layer (you'll be pasting in a copy of the image after it has the curves adjustment and contrast added.) the reason i did this is because i wasn't happy with the image after doing curves and contrast. i thought maybe a blending might work better. 8. go to layers, properties and then click on luminence. 9. adjust your opacity to 56. 10. layers merge, merge all.