If you would like a totally different method that gives you possibly greater control visually than the analytical methods you could try this. 1) just make your selection, in this case a beach rock and copy it to a new layer. Ctrl or Command J 2) Create a new layer directly above the layer containing the rock and choose Fill from the Edit Menu When the dialog appears choose to fill with 50% Grey and set the blend mode of the 50% grey layer to overlay or soft light 3) Clip the Grey layer to the underlying layer containing the rock alt-control-G or option-command-G on a Mac or from the menu The layers will look like this 4) Now with the 50% Grey layer selected, here called exposure, select a soft brush with a foreground color of 'black' and the opacity set at about 20%, flow is optional and paint over the area to be darkened. (if the foreground color was white it would lighten) . You will find only the selection will be affected due to the clipping mask. If you go too far press X on the keyboard to make the foreground color white and repaint which will lighten the selection. When you are finished you can further refine the dodge and burning by changing the opacity of the 50% grey layer. Below on the right is what I got using the technique. Sounds hard but just looks that way in print and takes less than a minute to do.
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