What you are looking for is called intelligent scissors, and it's got an 
icon of scissors towards the top of the toolbox.  If you are using the 
2.9 development version the intelligent scissors seem to be missing from 
that version.  Hopefully that's just a temporary situation.

That being said, what you really want to do is brighten part of your 
picture without brightening the parts that are already bright... you 
also want to make sure that you don't brighten the darkest parts of your 
image.

There are a lot of ways to do that.  The most straight forward is to use 
Colors -> Curves and adjust the curve so that just the dark parts get 
lightened.

My favorite way is to duplicate the image and then create a mask that 
also has the image in it, and set the layer to "Screen".  That way the 
image itself masks off the brigh parts of the image.  If you don't get 
enough brightness with the first layer, just duplicate your new layer. 
If you get a little too much, just adjust the opacity of the new layer 
till you have the desired result.

Brian

On 10/28/2013 08:18 PM, Michael Havens wrote:
> I took some cool pictures of the mountains but where the sun was made
> everything dark. I lightened everything but if I lighten it more the sky
> becomes bleached. I know GIMP used to have an edge detect select but I
> can't find it . What I want to do is select the mountains and everything
> below it and lighten only that. How do I do it?
> :-)~MIKE~(-:
>
>
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