How to Burn and Dodge in Photoshop

Okay, this a short lesson about a technique that I learnt from Scott Kelby training and this is in order to do what is traditionally have been called Dodging and Burning in photography. This is a photograph, I worked on a little bit and I have done a few things too. I have a couple of places here that I would like enhance it slightly. I would like this area right here to be a little bit less darker, but it is just a little bit unpleasant. Also I think I might would have darkened some of these highlights here, our dark spots here and I would lighten these highlight just a little bit, maybe add a little bit of shadow contour here to give the shade a little more base. We will play around with that may be just a little bit in here as well.

Here is how we do that, there are tools over here these are the dodging and burning tools, but I don't like to use them. They are difficult to use, I find them difficult to use. But here is the tool trick that I learnt from Scott Kelby, if you create a new layer and there are lots of ways to create a new layer but just to illustrate this, I am going to create it with this little option right here. If we click on that and take the new layer command, it prints up a dialogue that we don't normally get and it keeps us from having them do something a little later on, I am going to call this layer Burning and Dodging.

We are going to change the mode of this layer to soft light and then we are going to check this box here that says filled with soft light neutral color, once we do that a new layer is created, that is filled with grey. Now I could have created this layer just by clicking New Layer, changing the Overlay Mode to soft light and then coming up here to get it filled and asking it to fill it with 50% grey, but I did in one step with the other option, so that is a nice little shortcut. Okay we are ready to begin and the first thing we want to do is we want to select the Brush tool and we can click right here or we can press the letter B which selects it for us.

The second thing that we are going to need to do is come up here to our Opacity and we don't want a 100% opacity in our brush, we are going to be painting with black and white and by the way, it is a good idea when you select the brush tool, to hit the letter D and D makes sure that black is your default and white is your option for a background color. But we are going to back up here to the opacity and we are going to select that and press the five and then enter and we have just changed our opacity of our brush to 5%. That means that when we paint, only 5% of whatever we are asking for is actually coming through, that gives us a light hand and that is what we want in dealing with an image like this, because we just want subtle highlights.

Okay, we are painting on this layer. So, we want to make sure that layer is selected, we don't want to be painting on there. You paint on there and you will be painting black on her face or white on her face, that is not what we want. Instead we want to paint on this layer that has this effect soft light, that has an opacity of the brush of 5%, we have 100% opacity on the layer over here. Alright, let us get going, so the first thing we are going to do is we are going to click this right here to change white to our foreground and by the way X is a shortcut for that, press X and it goes back and forth. Once you have got white selected, you can come down here and you can just paint. On a little delicate area like this, sometimes I just click one, two, three, four, five, we are just lightening it up and I am moving it around.

It doesn't look like we have done very much, but if I come over here and turn that opacity of that layer off and on, you can see exactly what we have done. I think I want a little bit more up in here, just a little bit. So, now we have gotten rid off most of that little shadow region under her eye. Let us add a little darker over here, so I will press X just to select black and I am just going to paint a little bit of the shadow area there. I have been come down here a little bit and then I am going to come up in the hair here, reduce the size of my brush, darken some of these areas up here. It is probably is not going to do much, but it does illustrate the technique and then I am going to switch back to white by pressing X and then I am going to brighten these areas up a little bit. So, we are painting on a neutral gray, it is not a mask, it is a fill, but it is behaving like a mask, isn't it?

If we want to see what we have done, we can click and you can see in this area, that it's getting darker and lighter just a little bit, we didn't do it whole lot there. That is quick lesson on how to do a simple dodging and burning.