>>3666997Nice birb.
How did you do the mask? Was it with the brush tool? I find that drawing a path slightly inside of the area you want to light, then using feathering to push it out works great. It does some kind of edge detection and automatically fills out into the fine detail without bleeding out into the background too much. It takes some experimenting but it's far superior to the normal brush tool you see in most software. See before, after, and the mask used.
Also note the posterising on your leaves