Aug 21, 2015 | Uncategorized
Photo Retouching with Dodge/Burn The Dodge tool and the Burn tool lighten or darken areas of the image. These tools are based on a traditional darkroom technique for regulating exposure on specific areas of a print. Photographers hold back light to lighten an area on the print (dodging) or increase the exposure to darken areas on a print (burning). As useful as the Dodge and Burn tools are, however, they both suffer from a serious problem. Both of them cause permanent damage to your image, and this is never a good thing. The best way to work in Photoshop is to keep your original pixel information intact so you always have the original photo to fall back on. This is often referred to as working “non-destructively” in Photoshop, and it’s the way you should be working whenever and wherever possible. There are a few ways to do dodging and burning. I will describe three ways to do this. Option 1 – Levels For dodging and burning, you use one layer for dodging and another for burning with layer masks. To setup layers to for the dodging and burning you will need to do the following: 1. Create a new LEVELS adjustment layer. You can do this by selecting it from the icon in the layers menu, or you can click Layers in the top pane, go down to New Adjustment Layer, click on LEVELS and click OK. 2. Its good practice to name your layers, so double click directly on the name of the layer you just created and rename it to Dodge. 3. In the Blending Mode drop... read more
