Alright, we’re going to adjust the gold by hand to make it really stand out. Grab the Burn Tool. Set it to a soft brush and adjust the exposure if you wish.

Now carefully go over the darkest area of the gold with your brush.

Great! Now let’s make the shiny parts even shinier. Grab the Dodge Tool this time!

Play this by eye – go over the areas that are already lighter with Dodge.

Then I would adjust Dodge to maybe ‘Highlight’, set the brush smaller, and go over the area again to make one really bright spot.

Now that you’ve got your apple shined up, it’s time to add some texture if you so choose! Grab some gold texture – I’m using the Stock Exchange: Gold Blur. Copy and paste it as a new layer over your image.

Now holding down Ctrl, click the layer with the isolated apple on it. This will select that layer.

Making sure you’re actually on the gold texture layer, hit Shift-Ctrl-I to inverse. Then press Delete to get rid of the excess gold texture.

Set the texture layer to ‘Soft Light’.

Now grab the eraser tool and make sure it’s set to something soft.

We’re going to erase some bits of the golden texture – I’d advise giving it a quick run over the shiny spot.

And there you have it! A golden apple.

Like I said before, this technique works pretty well on artificial objects, but feel free to try it on ‘live’ things as well!

The golden chicken…

Lays the golden egg!