One way to brighten up dark areas with Gimp
Here is a description how you can brighten up dark areas in your photos using Gimp. It’s important that you understand how to use layers and layer mask . We have an image to start from where we have large dark areas.
The idea now is that I’ll just light up the dark areas. I create only one copy of a new layer by duplicating my original layer. The next step will be to me to make the image black and white and that is accomplished by the easiest way by Colors / Desaturate. Next, you invert the black and white layer, which you do under Colors / Invert.
Then we’ll take and make this layer blurred using Gaussian Blur, which you will find the Filter / Blur / Gaussian Blur. Here you can adjust it a little depending on what resolution the picture has. Now that you have your blurry black and white image, you should make a layer mask on it, you can do by selecting the layer and right click. You should choose to make a layer mask in gray-scale copy. You adjust the layer mode to Soft Light then so will the dark areas to light up. Is not it enough, you can copy the layers several times and even adjust the strength of the opacity.
