A lighting challenge

This is a silvery gibbon from the island of Java in Indonesia. I photographed it with film in the 90’s; back then, the fastest film I used for wildlife was Fujichrome Provia 100. With such a slow film by today’s standards, when shooting in a dim environment I was often forced to use flash. I don’t like the look of flash photography (especially on-camera flash) when taking pictures of animals, so in Photoshop I tried to tone down the harsh, flat illumination from the flash. I cloned out the reflections in the eyes, used the burn tool in an effort to simulate shadows, and I desaturated the color of the tree limb. There is only so much that could be done. One of the glaring inabilities of Photoshop is that it can’t change the direction of light. My settings were unrecorded.