Indoor picture

My friend was nice enough to let me take his picture and use it for this assignment.
This first picture is the original indoor without flash. Luckily, he has a big sliding glass door that lets in a lot of morning light.



I made a new layer in Photoshop and placed a copy in the layer. I adjusted the new layer using Image/ Adjustment/Curves and darkened the copy.
Then I made a copy of the second darker layer and made another even darker version.

By adjusting the opacity of each layer I was able to
selectively darken parts of the image. 

Using the oval select tool with a Feather setting of 250 I cut through the darker layers on top to get a circle of light around the subject. Then I made a black layer on top and using the oval select tool with a Feather setting of 250 I cut a soft hole through the black layer. The top black layer is then made semi-transparent by changing the opacity settings to 40%. This creates a soft vignette around the subject.


 The last touch is to crop the existing chair from the left edge of the photo. And finally after looking at the image, I decided to crop in tight around the subject in order to emphasize the vertical elements of the composition.