Have you ever said, “That photo would be perfect if only this part was lighter – or that part was darker”? More times than not, just about any photo can be improved by a little lightening or darkening of an area or element in the photo. Photoshop tools come to our rescue! I’ll show you a way to easily improve your almost-perfect photos using the Dodge and Burn tools to “paint” that lighter or darker area into your photos.
You’ll find these tools in the Enhance section of the Tools panel. The Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools are nested together in the Tools panel. In this tutorial, we will be working with Dodge and Burn tools; we’ll save the Sponge tool for another day.
Keep in mind the Dodge tool lightens pixels and the Burn tool darkens pixels. The more you paint over an area with the Dodge tool, the lighter the area will become. Accordingly, the more you paint over an area with the Burn tool, the darker the area will become.
After selecting which tool you need to use, select a brush from the drop-down menu in the Tool Options bar and adjust the size according to the size of the area you are going to “paint.” I find that a soft round brush usually works best.
Next, select the appropriate
range from the drop-down menu:
Shadows – if you want to lighten or darken a dark area in your photo
Midtones – if you want to lighten or darken an average-toned area in your photo
Highlights – if you want to lighten or darken a light area in your photo
Finally, use the slider to adjust the exposure percentage. The exposure is the strength of the brush stroke – you could also think of it as opacity.
Now you are ready to paint the area you want to lighten (Dodge) or darken (Burn).
In my first example, the original photo of the bird looks okay, but I think she is just a little too dark. I want to emphasize her and bring her out of the background a little. Because I want to lighten her, I’m choosing the Dodge tool and a large soft round brush. Since the bird is primarily gray, I select Midtones from the Range drop-down, setting the exposure to 35%. Keep in mind you may need to experiment with exposure percentages until you get the right amount of exposure for the photo you are working on.
Next, I duplicate the photo and close the original. Because this is essentially brushwork and we always want to put brushwork on its own layer, I duplicate the background layer. As I work, I can easily turn off the visibility of my duplicate layer to check my progress and compare the background with what I have already done.
Next, I click and brush on the bird a few times and here are my results:
In my next example, I want to darken the background. I like the original photo of the flower, but the few stray areas of light in the background are too distracting. With a few simple strokes of the Burn tool, I am able to eliminate them.
This time, I am using a large soft round brush, and because I want to darken a dark area of the photo, I select Shadows from the Range drop-down with the exposure at 50%.
While brushing the background, as I get closer to the edges of the petals, I switch to a hard round brush and use the left and right bracket keys to resize the brush as needed.
Here are the results:
I hope this inspires you to use the Dodge and Burn tools on your photos. I would love to see some of your Dodge and Burn work in the
Scrap Girls Gallery soon!
Tutorial written by Theresa Guyer
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