This result was achieved by simply centering a light spot, which was almost as big the photo, on the girl. Although the spot extended over the window and wall areas, LightMachine's Reflection feature kept them from getting brighter. Only the girl in the shadows was illuminated and that very evenly with soft light. So the result is a well-balanced and realistic correction.

You can't even see at first glance that a light spot was used to achieve the correction. That would be the case, too, if a real-life spot would have been positioned before the photo was taken.

After extensive tweaking the spot and its settings on a very small preview we managed to come up with this hard light result. The spot is clearly brightening up the already bright window, darkens the corners of the photo and only partially reveals the girl in the shadows.

If you added a second spot to reveal the girl a bit more, the shadows on the wall would get even more visible and it would get quite hard to avoid blown highlights.

This tool lets you add relative selective directional light beams. In this example we made the light shine from inside the room to illuminate the girl in the shadows. Because this tool is more specialized on special effects, some of the settings had to be suppressed to get a more realistic than artistic effect. However, it wasn't possible to get a better contrast, so the girl looks quite faded.

Paint Shop Pro's Lights Filter
($120 / $70)

Using a fill-flash type light on the photo brightens up the whole image. The already bright wall and window are brightened up too much while the girl wasn't really affected. Using other properties for the light spot or using more light spots produced artificial looking results.