Damien Symonds

My pleasure. It's what I'm here for.

Great. So, click on the mask of one of those layers, and apply a little bit of Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur, to make the edge just soft enough to be plausible. Then repeat on the mask of the other layer.

No, you didn't

I guess so ...

Good.

The solution is so easy you'll fall of your chair. Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. On the Reds channel, move the Lightness slider all the way to +100. On the Yellows channel, move the Lightness slider to about +15 or so. Mask loosely to the hair. No precision required, as you'll see.

Generally it's easier to lighten the shadow areas, rather than try to add shadow to sunny areas. I use this method. Make sure you open up the shadows as much as possible during your raw processing, before attempting any magic in Photoshop. As you yourself indicated in your question, the goal here is to reduce the severity of the problem to a modest degree. Removing the problem altogether is impossible.

Well, that would definitely depend on the paint colour of the ceiling.

Yep!

Of course! Just brighten her using adjustment layers.

Yes, it's really impressive, well done!

I think it's feasible for sure! The problem is not the composite, it's the lighting. You need to brighten the baby, I reckon.

I'm very distrustful of lamps. Their light is so directional, they can never provide the nice even lighting your room needs.

Please don't condemn yourself to the hours and hours and hours of editing this would involve. Get it white in camera. Maybe this will involve putting the jewellery on a light box? I'm not sure.

No. Raw Class first.

This happens to all of us occasionally, and an unfortunate few people all the time. It sounds like you're not clicking here?

Just to check - you can see how completely implausible they are, right?

Download the PSD

It was done using this method.

Looks good. May I see a 100% crop of the area?

There must be a vector version of that image in existence. You need to bust heads until you get it.

I inverted, then used the polygonal lasso tool to select the straight line, and filled in the lower area with white.

Does it still work on older files, where you know it used to work?

Ok, that one is really dodgy. The reflection in the water isn't even red like it should be! It's possible it's Flood?

Lovely. Now restart and see if the problem still exists.