On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 16:41 -0300, Rich wrote:

A friend was telling me about a method he uses with "Enhance / Adj Lighting" for Shadows and Highlights in Photoshop. I see the different values under Color Balance, but is there another tool or method that would only adjust lighting in Gimp?

Based on your description, I believe you'll be happiest working with Color Balance for this problem. However, "adjusting lighting" can mean a lot of things when working in a raster image editor like GIMP. Once you've become comfortable with Color Balance, you can try using Curves, Levels and the host of other dialogs available from the Colors menu applied to a selection of pixels from your image in order to adjust what visually appear to be lighting elements in the canvas. Alternatively, you can apply lighting effects by using layers and adding black or white filled selections that are blended (using Layer Modes) to lighten or darken regions of a canvas. There are also some filters under Filters->Light and Shadow that can be used to change the apparent lighting in the image. Drop Shadow and Lighting Effects are probably the two most widely used here.

All that said, the closest thing to something that specifically "adjusts lighting" in GIMP are the features you'll find in the Color Balance dialog.