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Dodging and Burning Tutorial

Having seen fishingruddy’s atmospheric card player portraits in the gallery, I thought I’d put together this tutorial on dodging and burning.

Dodging and burning is the selective lightening (dodging) and darkening (burning) of a picture. If you can’t remember which way round it works, think of it as being like toast. If you burn a bit of toast, you make it go blacker! In the traditional darkroom, it was usually associated with black and white printing. In the digital darkroom, I’ve found the same technique described below can also be applied to colour images.

The description given applies to Adobe Photoshop. I use CS2, but I can’t think why it shouldn’t work on any version of Photoshop, including Elements, as I’m not doing anything particularly exotic here.

Step 1
Open up the image you want to dodge and burn in Photoshop, press the F7 key if you haven’t got the layers palette showing, at the bottom of the layers palette, click on the “create new layer”, in CS2 that’s the icon to the left of the trash can icon on the bottom of the palette.

Step 2
In the layers palette, double click on the new layer title “Layer 1” and change the title to Burn. With that layer selected, go to Edit – Fill and use 50% Gray in the dialogue box called up. Click on OK, but then don’t be alarmed when all the picture goes gray. In the layers palette, click where it says “Normal” in the top left corner, and change the drop down selection to “Overlay”.

Step 3
Repeat the things you’ve done in Step 2, but give this new layer the title Dodge.

Step 4
Select the Burn layer on the layers palette, and press D on the keyboard to get the default colour selection of black foreground colour and white background colour.

Step 5
Select the Brush tool, either by clicking on the brush tool icon, or pressing B on the keyboard. Make sure the brush mode in the brush toolbar options at the top of the screen is set to Mode: Normal. Change the brush opacity to about 15% or maybe 20% and set the brush size to about 200 pixels (depending on the size of your image).

Step 6
Work over the image in the areas you want to darken by clicking and dragging with the brush. The strength of the effect can be varied by changing the opacity of the brush.

Step 7
Once you’ve got the darker bits done, press X on the keyboard to swap the colours to foreground white. Select the Dodge layer on the layers palette and work the brush over the bits you want to make lighter.

If you overdo an area, you can swap the colour back by pressing X and repainting the bit you’ve overdone. Once your happy with your edits, flatten the layers Layer – Flatten Image.

If you set Photoshop to record an action to make light work of the above layer creation steps, and have it ready to hand whenever you want to selectively lighten or darken an image.

Hope this helps.

Duncan