7 Dodge Tool
Used to lighten
tones
Found at #23 in the Toolbar diagram at left
The burn, and sponge tools are hidden under the dodge tool in the toolbox.
If one of these was used last, it will be on top, and the dodge tool will
be hidden. To find it, click on the tool which is showing, and choose
the one you want from the pop-up menu.
The dodge tool will lighten the pixels dragged over according to the percentage chosen in the tool’s options bar [see below]. You can choose to lighten highlights, midtones, or shadows. Each must be worked on separately; the tool does not work on all three at once.
To use the dodge tool, select it in the toolbox, choose your settings in the options bar, pick a brush from the pop-up palette, and drag in the image to lighten the chosen tones. This tool has an effect on click, but does not do any additional work until it’s moved (unless you click the airbrush button). However, repeated stroking over the same area does have a cumulative effect.
If you choose Edit > Fade immediately after using this tool, you can change the opacity of the strokes you have just applied.
A shortcut for changing brush sizes while using this tool is to press the left bracket [ to decrease brush size, and the right bracket ] to choose a larger brush. Shift-right-clicking on your document while using this tool will open its Range menu next to your cursor.
Note that these tools cannot be used on 1 bit Bitmap mode, or Indexed color mode images.
The keyboard shortcut for the dodge tool is the letter O. You can cycle through the dodge, burn, and sponge tools by holding down the Shift key while pressing the shortcut letter.
The illustration below, is the dodge tool’s options bar.
To choose a brush size and type, click on the brush thumbnail. A pop-up
palette of available brushes will appear. Press Enter or click on your
document’s blue title bar to close the palette after you’ve
chosen a new brush. If you want to access the full brushes palette with
its many options, click the brushes palette button at the far right end
of the options bar.
You can also right-click on your document to open the brushes pop-up palette next to the cursor. For more information on brushes, please see the Brushes in 7 tutorial. If you are still using Photoshop 6, find information on the your brushes palette on the old brushes page.
To find any tool presets that have been made for this tool, click on the tool’s thumbnail at the left end of the options bar. To reset the tool to its default settings, right-click on the tool’s thumbnail and choose Reset Tool from the menu that appears.
The Range menu is where you choose which tones will be affected
by your edits. You can work on only one at at time. If Shadows
is selected, only dark areas will be lightened. Dragging the tool over
bright, highlight areas will have no effect, and vice versa when Highlights
is selected.
The Exposure slider determines how fast the image is lightened where you drag over it with this tool. I recommend using an Exposure setting of not more than 10 % when using this and the burn tool. At low settings, this tool can be very useful; higher settings can make a mess of your picture.
Click the airbrush button if you want the tool to continue to act on
your picture as long as the left mouse button is pressed, even when the
cursor is not moving.
If you have doodled with a tool’s options and want to get back to the default settings, right-click that tool’s icon at the far left end of its options bar (in Photoshop 6, left-click). Choose either Reset Tool to reset only the current tool, or Reset All Tools to restore default settings to every tool.
Please note that all descriptions, and illustrations featured refer to files which are in Photoshop’s .psd format, and which are in RGB color mode. Other file formats, and color modes may generate different options. Some Photoshop features are not available for images not in .psd format, or RGB color mode. To find what color mode your image is in, choose Image > Mode.
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