Skip to main content

Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes

Lesson 30 from: Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Blake Rudis

Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes

Lesson 30 from: Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Blake Rudis

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

30. Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Bootcamp Introduction

16:22
2

The Bridge Interface

13:33
3

Setting up Bridge

06:55
4

Overview of Bridge

11:29
5

Practical Application of Bridge

27:56
6

Introduction to Raw Editing

11:00
7

Setting up ACR Preferences & Interface

07:39
8

Global Tools Part 1

16:44
9

Global Tools Part 2

20:01
10

Local Tools

22:56
11

Introduction to the Photoshop Interface

07:13
12

Toolbars, Menus and Windows

25:07
13

Setup and Interface

11:48
14

Adobe Libraries

05:57
15

Saving Files

07:39
16

Introduction to Cropping

12:10
17

Cropping for Composition in ACR

04:44
18

Cropping for Composition in Photoshop

12:40
19

Cropping for the Subject in Post

03:25
20

Cropping for Print

07:34
21

Perspective Cropping in Photoshop

07:11
22

Introduction to Layers

08:42
23

Vector & Raster Layers Basics

05:05
24

Adjustment Layers in Photoshop

27:35
25

Organizing and Managing Layers

15:35
26

Introduction to Layer Tools and Blend Modes

21:34
27

Screen and Multiply and Overlay

09:15
28

Soft Light Blend Mode

07:34
29

Color and Luminosity Blend Modes

12:47
30

Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes

07:43
31

Introduction to Layer Styles

11:43
32

Practical Application: Layer Tools

13:06
33

Introduction to Masks and Brushes

04:43
34

Brush Basics

09:22
35

Custom Brushes

04:01
36

Brush Mask: Vignettes

06:58
37

Brush Mask: Curves Dodge & Burn

06:53
38

Brush Mask: Hue & Saturation

07:52
39

Mask Groups

05:52
40

Clipping Masks

04:11
41

Masking in Adobe Camera Raw

07:06
42

Practical Applications: Masks

14:03
43

Introduction to Selections

05:42
44

Basic Selection Tools

17:41
45

The Pen Tool

11:56
46

Masks from Selections

04:22
47

Selecting Subjects and Masking

07:11
48

Color Range Mask

17:35
49

Luminosity Masks Basics

12:00
50

Introduction to Cleanup Tools

07:02
51

Adobe Camera Raw

10:16
52

Healing and Spot Healing Brush

14:56
53

The Clone Stamp Tool

10:20
54

The Patch Tool

06:38
55

Content Aware Move Tool

04:56
56

Content Aware Fill

06:46
57

Custom Cleanup Selections

15:42
58

Introduction to Shapes and Text

13:46
59

Text Basics

15:57
60

Shape Basics

07:00
61

Adding Text to Pictures

09:46
62

Custom Water Marks

14:05
63

Introduction to Smart Objects

04:37
64

Smart Object Basics

09:13
65

Smart Objects and Filters

09:05
66

Smart Objects and Image Transformation

10:57
67

Smart Objects and Album Layouts

11:40
68

Smart Objects and Composites

10:47
69

Introduction to Image Transforming

04:34
70

ACR and Lens Correction

09:45
71

Photoshop and Lens Correction

14:26
72

The Warp Tool

11:16
73

Perspective Transformations

20:33
74

Introduction to Actions in Photoshop

09:27
75

Introduction to the Actions Panel Interface

05:06
76

Making Your First Action

03:49
77

Modifying Actions After You Record Them

11:38
78

Adding Stops to Actions

04:01
79

Conditional Actions

07:36
80

Actions that Communicate

25:26
81

Introduction to Filters

04:38
82

ACR as a Filter

09:20
83

Helpful Artistic Filters

17:08
84

Helpful Practical Filters

07:08
85

Sharpening with Filters

07:32
86

Rendering Trees

08:20
87

The Oil Paint and Add Noise Filters

15:08
88

Introduction to Editing Video

06:20
89

Timeline for Video

08:15
90

Cropping Video

03:34
91

Adjustment Layers and Video

05:25
92

Building Lookup Tables

07:00
93

Layers, Masking Video & Working with Type

15:11
94

ACR to Edit Video

06:10
95

Animated Gifs

11:39
96

Introduction to Creative Effects

06:08
97

Black, White, and Monochrome

18:05
98

Matte and Cinematic Effects

08:23
99

Gradient Maps and Solid Color Grades

12:20
100

Gradients

04:21
101

Glow and Haze

10:23
102

Introduction to Natural Retouching

05:33
103

Brightening Teeth

10:25
104

Clean Up with the Clone Stamp Tool

08:07
105

Cleaning and Brightening Eyes

16:58
106

Advanced Clean Up Techniques

24:47
107

Introduction to Portrait Workflow & Bridge Organization

14:47
108

ACR for Portraits Pre-Edits

21:27
109

Portrait Workflow Techniques

18:46
110

Introduction to Landscape Workflow & Bridge Organization

12:17
111

Landscape Workflow Techniques

37:36
112

Introduction to Compositing & Bridge

06:59
113

Composite Workflow Techniques

34:01
114

Landscape Composite Projects

24:14
115

Bonus: Rothko and Workspace

05:15
116

Bonus: Adding Textures to Photos

07:05
117

Bonus: The Mask (Extras)

05:18
118

Bonus: The Color Range Mask in ACR

04:54

Lesson Info

Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes

When I'm doing my color grading, I often refer to the color wheel quite a bit, and this is a download that you can get. This is the color wheel that I've created that I use on a lot of my images as I've said before. When I'm looking at color grading, I'm considering a couple different things. I'm considering what am I going to do to the dark areas of my image? What am I gonna do to the light areas of my image? And what colors am I gonna use? Because color is gonna play a huge role in what the viewer is going to see in the end result. So a lot of the times, I refer to the color wheel. I don't guess, I don't play games with the color. I look at the color wheel. As a traditional painter, this color wheel was always next to me while I painted. It helped me mix my colors and all kinds of crazy stuff, so bringing that in to my photography world, I have a color wheel, even though you'd think, "Blake, you've probably memorized this thing by now." Yes, I dream about it, I sleep about it. This i...

s my life, but I still have one printed out right above my computer screen at all times. So when I'm thinking about color grading, especially when I'm thinking about color grading in terms of the adjustments that I want to use, when I want to manipulate the highlights in one area, but also manipulate the shadows in another area, it's what we call split toning, and you probably see that in Adobe CameraRoll. This is a more crazy approach to it, I guess if you want to say, in Photoshop. But I look at the color wheel and I say, "Okay, if I want to make a unified image that has unified color and unified shadows and highlights, I'm gonna use the things that I know create unity and harmony in an image." And that's typically going to be things that are across the color wheel from one another. That's a very harmonious way to introduce color to make the viewer not want to run scared. You want to run scared, color grade your images from '70s posters. That will make your viewer run scared. The colors that they used were just wild, all over the place, that almost seemed to have no rhyme or reason. Well, when we color grade using things that are compliments, or even analogous colors, analogous colors would be things on the color wheel that are closely related to each other, that are within three, I would say, of each other. So this would be a good analogous color scheme. This would be good analogous, good analogous. But when I want to create a little bit of dynamic transition between the highlights and shadows, I'm gonna use compliments. So I bring this up and I show this to you because we're gonna get into the color dodge and burn, and with the color dodge and burn set, we have a blue layer here. So I'm gonna change this blend mode to color burn, which, as we said, is going to bring along that color, but add a lot of contrast with it, right? So this is essentially burning my image with the color blue, and it's a very dark color blue that it's burning my image with. If I were to just come down here, as I said before, and drop the opacity, it's just dropping the intensity of the calculation that's happening. Whereas if I were to go and drop the fill down, the fill, what you see here, is as I drop that fill down, it's protecting any areas of white in my image. So when we're talking about burning, you know, this is burning the entire thing with blue. It's all getting really blue, crazy blue, really dark, so much so that even these areas of white have turned solid blue, which is not what we want when we're burning, 'cause when we're burning, we typically want to focus on our shadow areas. Unless you're manipulating it with your own dodging and burning by your hand as an artist, we want to make things darker, we want to make them darker. We want to make lighter, it's lighter, right? So if I drop this fill down, watch what happens. Incrementally as I drop it down, it's starting to protect the areas of highlights and transition its way down into areas of dark, so much so that when I drop this fill all the way down to here, it's now basically protecting my mid-tones all the way to my highlights, and this is the only thing that's getting the darkness. On the flip-side, we have the color dodge. If we were to bring this fill up to 100%, that color dodge is not just affecting what's happening with my highlights, it's also affecting what's happening over there with my shadows, so if I were to go ahead and drop down this fill, it's going the opposite direction, see that? Because those blend modes are opposite each other. They do the opposite of what the color dodge will dodge, color burn will burn, and it's just opposites. So on that note, if we go ahead and add a image here, let's go ahead and go and add that solid color fill with that dark blue layer. I'm gonna go ahead and change this to color burn. With that set to color burn, if I drop this fill, you'll start to see some of those highlight areas starting to poke through, right? So much so that if I keep going all the way down, all the way down, all the way down, I am now applying that color burn to just basically the shadow areas, slightly transitioning into the mid-tones. If I drop this fill even further down, to say something like 10%, it's very subtle. The thing is, what I want you to get from Photoshop is that we are not a hammer. We're not a jackhammer, okay? We don't want to take our image down. We want to make subtle effects that will subtly build up and create the look that we want. If you want to go in there and try to just jackhammer into Photoshop, it's not gonna work, okay? So with this set to color burn at 10%, if I were to flip this over, and go to color dodge, it's now going to add that blue to my white areas. But what I want to do is I want to leave that at color burn, and I'm gonna come up here, and I'm gonna add a new solid color fill, but again, good practices, let's call these shadows or shads for short. I'm gonna add a solid color fill, and I'm gonna select a yellowish kind of tan color, 'cause this blue and tan's a beautiful color combination when you're color grading, it's absolutely gorgeous. Change this to color dodge, drop the fill, and now you see that I've got a really nice ... Darker areas are more blue, and the highlight areas are more cream. So if I were to also come up here to-- Let's just drop this, bring this all the way back up. This is color dodge. If I were to bring the opacity down, it doesn't have the same effect, because what is the opacity doing here versus the fill? The opacity is setting the intensity of the calculation. The fill is setting the calculation. So if we come back down to our fill, and we drop that fill down to about here, and then we drop our opacity down, look at that. We can get a really good calculation, and then just drop the intensity of that calculation. And they work hand in hand, so now if I come down here and I drop the fill, you're gonna see that slight application of that color. But there's more, always. The great thing about color fills is that any time now, I can change these colors. Let's say I want to go with more of like a green and magenta, so I'll use magenta for my shadows, and I'll double click here, and use green for my highlights. It's a different look. It still looks good, it's just a different look. Let's change this to cyan, 'cause again, the color combinations of cyan and red work very well together. Again, it just works so well together. But we can also do something analogous. Analogous would be maybe changing this to orange. And now we have an orange and red kind of color scheme all happening on the image really quickly and pretty easily.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Photoshop Bootcamp Plug-In
Textures
Clouds
Painted Backgrounds
1 – Intro to Photoshop Bootcamp
6 – Intro to Raw Editing.zip
11 – Interface and Setup
16 – Intro to Cropping and Composition.zip
22 – Intro to Layers.zip
26 – Intro to Layer Tools.zip
43 – Intro to Selections.zip
50 – Intro to Cleanup Tools.zip
58 – Intro to Shapes and Text.zip
63 – Intro to Smart Objects.zip
69 – Intro to Image Transforming.zip
74 – Intro to Actions.zip
81 – Filters.zip
88 – Intro to Editing Video.zip
96 – Custom Effects.zip
102 – Natural Retouching.zip
107 – Intro to Portrait Workflow.pdf
110 – Intro to Landscape Workflow.zip
112 – Intro to Compositing.zip
115 – Rothko and Interfaces (Bonus Video).zip
33 – Intro to Masks and Brushes.zip
106 - Frequency Separation.zip

Ratings and Reviews

Robert Andrews
 

Blake Rudis is the absolute best in teaching photoshop. His knowledge and how he presents the instruction is clear and concise - there is NO ONE BETTER. Yes, his classes require some basic skills, and maybe I'd organize the order of (or group) the classes in a different order, but, let me be clear - if anyone is to be successful or famous in the Photoshop world, it should be Blake Rudis. I strongly recommend his teaching. I started photography and post processing in 2018, and because of this class, I'm know what Im doing. The energy you get when you create something beautiful is profound, it makes you bounce out of bed (at 4AM) like a 5 year old, to go create. It's a great ride! Thanks Blake, & Thanks Creative live.

a Creativelive Student
 

Amazing course, but don't be fooled into thinking this is a beginner's course for photographers. The problem isn't Blake's explanations; they're top. The problem is the vast scope of this course and the order in which the topics are presented. Take layers for example. When I was first learning Photoshop (back when we learned from books), I found I learned little or nothing from, for example, books that covered layers before they covered how to improve/process photographs. These books taught me how to organize, move, and link layers before they showed me what a layer was actually for. Those books tended to teach me everything there is to know about layers (types of layers, how to organize them, how to move them, how to move them two at a time, how to move them two at a time even if there are other layers between the two you're interested in, useful troubleshooting tips, etc. ) all before I even know (from a photographer's point of view) what it is the things actually do. The examples of organizing, linking, and moving mean everything for graphic designers from Day One, but for photographers not so much. Blake does the same thing as those books. Topics he covers extremely early demand a lot of theoretical imagination for a photographer who doesn't already know quite a bit about what he is talking about. Learning about abstract things first and concrete things later only makes PS that much harder to understand. If you AREN'T a beginner, however, this course is amazing. I thought it would be like an Army Bootcamp, taking you from zero and building you into a fit, competent Photoshop grunt. Now I think it's more like Army Bootcamp for high school varsity jocks. It isn't going to take you from the beginning, but the amount you'll get out of it is nonetheless more than your brain can imagine. I've been using PS for years to improve my photographs, and even to create the odd artistic composite or two. The amount I've learned in the first week is amazing, and every day I learn something -- more like many things -- which I immediately implement to improve my productivity and/or widen the horizons of what I can achieve. If you ARE a photographer who's a Photoshop beginner, I'd take very seriously the advice Blake gives in the introduction: Watch one lesson, and practice the skills and principles you learn in that one lesson for two weeks. THEN watch the next lesson. You can't do that of course without buying the course, so it's up to you to decide whether you'd like to learn Photoshop and master Photoshop all from the same course. Learning it first and mastering it later will cost more money, but I think you'll understand everything better and have a much more enjoyable ride in the process. As for me? I'm going to have to find the money to buy this course. There is simply way too much content in each lesson for me to try to take on all at once, but on the other hand I don't want to miss anything at all that he has to share.

Esther Gambrell
 

WOW!!! I've been purchasing CL classes for several years now and have watched HOURS of "How-To Photoshop" classes, but this is the first one I've actually purchased because of the AWESOME BONUS content!!! SERIOUSLY??!!?!? A PLUG-IN??? But not only that, Blake is SO easy to understand, and he breaks down concepts in different ways to connect with different people's learning styles. I REALLY appreciated this approach because I am a LEFT-BRAINED creative that has an engineering background, so I really connected to what Blake was saying. THANK YOU FOR THAT! There are TONS of Photoshop courses out there, but I found this one to be the most helpful in they way Blake teaches concepts so that you know WHY you're doing what your doing. I feel like he taught me how to fish with Photoshop to feed me for a lifetime instead of just giving me a fish to feed me for one day. This is the BEST overall PS course out there!!! Thank you!!!!

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES