Dec 23
Photo Tips #2 — Dodge and Burn
Today’s Christmas photo tip (see yesterday’s here) is non-destructive dodging (lightening) and burning (darkening) a photo selectively. This can be useful for awkward shadows and highlights. Dodging can be particularly useful for bringing up the whites of the eyes, or improving the look of teeth.
Just about every photo editor has dedicated tools for doing this, but they work on the original image, and it’s easy to go too far. The way I’m going to show you leaves the original photo unaffected, and can be altered, redone, or thrown away at any time. Remember, boys and girls, if you can do something non-destructively, it’s almost always the better way to go.
These instructions are for Photoshop, but many programs mimic this way of doing it.
First create a new layer (1), which will sit above the main photo ready for you to paint on (2). This layer needs filling with a neutral 50% gray. That means exactly half-way between black and white.1
Then set the layer to overlay mode in the blend mode drop-down.
N.B. In Photoshop there’s a quick shortcut way to do this. As you click the new layer icon (1), hold down the ALT key. This pops up this dialogue box.
Set the Mode (3) to Overlay, and tick the box (4) that says “Fill with Overlay-neutral color”. (The box is grayed out until you set the mode to Overlay.) Click OK and your layer is all ready to use.
Now all you need to do is paint on this new layer, whichever way you’ve created it. Select a brush size that’s about right for the area you want to change, and paint in either black or white.
I find it’s worth setting the brush opacity to around 5% only, which makes very small changes to the image. For larger changes simply paint over the area several times.
Painting in black darkens the image below your dodge / burn layer, and painting in white lightens it.
If you’ve overdone the dodging with your white paint, change the brush colour to black and paint over your strokes. If at any time you want to start again, simply re-fill the layer with 50% gray.
Happy photo-editing.
Notes- If you’re wondering what those values are: you can type it into the boxes in your colour picker: the RGB values are 128 for each, the HSB values are H 0, S 0, and B 50%, and the hex code is #808080 [↩]