Enhancing contrast with gradient masks and clipping-masked curves

…In this project, want to add a couple more tools…to your tool set, for going from color to grayscale.…want to show you, clipping mask controlled adjustment…layers, and also gradient masks, and how…we can use those, to fine-tune our images to get just the look we want.…So let's get started on this image.…We can tell by looking at it, that we're…going to need two different black and white conversions here.…One for the sky, and one for the snow, no doubt about it.…And we've already got some masks here, to help us do that.…First, let's go ahead and set critical…highlights and shadow points, by making a Curves…adjustment layer, and let's Option, and Alt, and…pull here, and sure enough, we see the…real bright portion of the image up here, which is in the sky, so we're going to…hold down the Shift key and click to create a color sample at point number one.…

After we select our eye dropper tool, colour sample point number…one, and just kind of scooch it right up there in the corner.…Notice it's 252, 252, 255, and how about down here in the snow?…