original

Original picture. Note how the girl in the foreground is harshly and over brightly lit, and there is a lot of extraneous stuff in the background.

cropped

First thing to do was to crop the picture. Everything I do from now on will be based on this cropped picture.

one_multiplied_layer

I took the cropped image, and duplicated the background layer, and multiplied it with an opacity of 75%.

two_multiplied_layers

This image has two duplicate layers, both multiplied with different opacities.

backlight_tool_plus_lighten

Start again, this time used the backlight tool to brighten up the background, then the brightness tool to bring it all down.

DCS_combined_with_levels_and_background

For this one I went back to the raw camera file instead of the jpeg, and applied the level tool to brighten it up a bit, and used the "background fill" tool.