[amethyst_jean]

Any photo editor I've had before has been very basic (crop, rotate, change colour effects), none of the stuff that is in GIMP which is one of the ones suggested to me in another post. Even if you don't use gimp maybe you can help me, because I'm sure many of the terms are the same and I can find them in my program. There are so many things that I don't know (and I went through the tutorials on the gimp site) but I will ask only one for now. I have a photo and I have one part that I want to decrease the brightness and another that I would like the original or brighter, and only apply a smoothing affect to that part. I assume this is done in layers, but I have never used layers before so I have no idea what to do. Do I duplicate my picture as a new layer, create a new transparent layer and copy portions of my picture that I am going to work on, or something completely different? TIA