Dodge and Burn

page one
Dodging and burning are techniques used by photographers during printing to increase or decrease exposure to particular areas of the image.
     The tools by this name in Photoshop have one big advantage over traditional burning and dodging techniques; they can be limited to shadows, midtones, or highlights. This means you can either increase or decrease the intensity of highlights or shadows.
     Consider the fact that the Levels, Curves, and Brightness/Contrast commands work by brightening highlights, and darkening shadows throughout the image. Curves can be selectively applied to one level of tones, but the tones of that value throughout the image will be affected. With the Dodge or Burn tools, you can manipulate highlights, midtones, or shadows, only, and do it locally.
     The Dodge tool is used for lightening tones, and the Burn tool is used for making tones darker. Please note that neither of these tools is good for using on evenly toned areas such as open sky, or untextured surfaces.		 next
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Displacing Textures 		Here is an image that doesn’t work because of all of the distracting debris around it. If I can reduce the contrast of the leaves and bushes, the image will be a lot better. However, it is very important not to go so far that it looks like two pictures pasted together.
     For such manipulations, I much prefer to use the Burn tool set to work only on the Highlights, and selectively work over the bright areas that I want to reduce. I feel the irregularity of hand work makes the reduction look much more natural.
    I use the Burn tool, set to Highlights with a very low Exposure. I never, ever use this tool with Exposure set to more than 10 %. I often use it at less than that.
      I dragged over the bright leaves, and branches around the tree until they were reduced just enough to be less obtrusive, but not enough to appear false.
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Copyright © 2004 by Jay Arraich.
All rights reserved.
All photographs copyright ©2004 by Jay Arraich
jay@arraich.com
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