Highlight Blending

As you can see I am still posting a few of the landscapes I took a few days ago, the weather hasn't been great recently so I have to play with older photos. This is a technique I used to merge a half colour, half black and white image on the basis of luminance values, I know that sounds a bit complex but it's a simple enough method. With this image I duplicated the layer and on the new layer I selected the highlights (ctrl+alt+tilde) tilde is the key above the tab key. I then applied this as a layer mask (this will look like a greyscale version of the layer). Nothing will change yet but if you then apply a black and white adjustment to the background layer only you should have an effect similar to this. You can always play around with the B&W sliders to get an effect you are happy with.