Dodge and Burn
page threeThe sharpening tools work by increasing contrast along edges. They darken the darker side of an edge, and lighten the lighter side. This makes an edge more pronounced, and therefore appear to be more sharp.
However, if you have details in your image that are just about to go to pure white, or pure black, using a sharpening tool can push them over the edge, and lose your detail.
The Dodge tool, applied to Highlights, makes them lighter. The Burn tool, applied to Shadows, makes them darker. This is the opposite of what I did on the previous page. There, I used the Burn tool on Highlights to make them darker, effectively reducing contrast.
Burning shadows, or dodging highlights is like using half a sharpening tool. You are only affecting one side of an edge; the darker, or the lighter. Therefore, if you have a part of your image that you would like to sharpen, but which has highlights that cannot be made whiter without losing detail, you can still do half a sharpen. Dragging the Burn tool over that highlight, with it set to Midtones, or Shadows will leave the highlight intact, while darkening any less bright edges.
Below, is a detail from the original tree roots image. I wanted to sharpen this detail, since it was the most interesting part of the image, but the dark areas are already almost black.
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(original image)
Below is the result of a very moderate Unsharp Mask adjustment.
I used the default Amount of 50 %, a Radius of 1.0 pixels
(the default), and increased Threshold to 3 Levels to remove
sharpening from the darker areas.
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The resulting detail looks like this (below).
(Dodge tool detail)
Though it is not appropriate for this image, I’ll show you what the Burn tool does when dragged over the shadows in this detail As with the Dodge too, I never, ever use this tool set to anything more than 10 % Exposure.
Here is the detail. As you can see, both these tools allow one to work on one side of an edge while leaving the other alone. This is like half a sharpening tool, and gives one added options when dealing with subtle details.
(Burn tool detail)
what you don’t want to do; lose what little detail was in
this very dark area. By using the Dodge tool, applied only
to the highlights, you can leave those shadow details
unmolested.
There is one more thing that the dodge and burn
tools are handy for. I’ll show you that, next.
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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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