Now go to your pop up menu and choose Curves.

Since you made a selection, the rest of the adjustment layer is masked so therefore, not visible.

You will notice automatically an increase in the contrast. When working on images that are black and white but scanned in RGB mode, then you can use Enhance per channel contrast to give a little more of an edginess than what would normally be there in grayscale mode.  This is enhancing the contrast independently in each of the channels to result in a more vibrant effect. Press OK for now and now choose a brush tool.

Since you made a selection first the adjustment only applied to that selected area, but it is still there, it’s just masked. To reveal the same adjustment to apply to other parts of the image (layer beneath) use your brush

with white as the foreground color to paint 'in' the adjustment layer mask to areas that you want to be affected by the adjustment.

Go ahead and paint in some more of the adjustment layer with the white brush to reveal the adjustment layer.

Now you can go ahead and keep working on lightening areas that are too dark because of the increase in contrast. To do that, grab a black brush to go over areas that are too dark because of the adjustment (on the adjustment layer mask) to hide the effect of the adjustment and bring back the original ‘lighter’ version of the dark areas which were OK with the original.

You can also switch to darker shades of grey to hide most of the adjustment layer effect right above that point (after you have brought the image visible under a white brush to reveal the adjustment).

The fastest way when you’re on the adjustment layer mask to have it apply to the entire layer beneath and visibly is to Alt Backspace or go to Edit: Fill and then choose foreground or background (depending which one you have as white).

You can carefully bring back the detail to darkened areas once again, by using the brush on a dark gray or black to hide the adjustment layer’s high contrast effect and bring back the original lightness to darker areas to help balance the image out.
 

Remember that pure black will completely hide any of the adjustment using the brush. Darker shades of gray will mostly hide it and whiter will reveal more of the adjustment. I teach this concept extensively in my Basic Photoshop training.

It’s important to balance out the image here so that the dresses or dark dark’s are not too dark. But the image definitely needed the correction we did.

  

Here is a rubylith view ( \ ) of the areas that I’ve masked on the adjustment layer which will allow the original pixels below to show through, creating the lighter effect on the darker areas.

Here is the before and after of what I’ve done so far.

You can make some more improvements to it by creating a new Curves adjustment layer.

If the areas that are supposed to be white are still a little to grey or washed out you can increased their contrast (pretty much alone) by using the method I teach in the photo restoration video training of alt clicking on an area to get your source point on the curves graph and either entering the output curve of the area that you want it to be or nudging it up a little.

Here I’ve created two different source points to increase the contrast of the whites.

For my complete Photoshop photo restoration training click here.