AmandaEllerman

Here's what I came up with. I don't feel like I quite got it as well as you did, especially down at the bottom, but nothing I was trying was working any better.

That does look much better! But I'm not really clear on what you did with the Levels layer...I haven't taken the Levels class yet and it's not something I've played with. Did you do something like you did here? https://www.damiensymonds.net/levels-eyedropper

I was testing a new background idea using lights, and unfortunately I didn't make the lights go wide enough to cover the whole background. Lesson learned! I have tried duplicating the lights, but the shading of the paper background is making that extremely difficult. Straight up cloning didn't work. What I did here was make a layer of just lights, merged it with a solid color layer, and then masked it off the subject. It doesn't look as...real, somehow, I think maybe because I'm losing the little bits that were the wires connecting the lights? In any case, I wanted to see if there was a better way before I tweak the lights and clean up the masking.