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The Burn and Dodge Tools

Lesson 28 from: FAST CLASS: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

28. The Burn and Dodge Tools

These tools are used to darken and lighten areas of an image. Mark explains how to use these tools and when to use more modern tools instead.
Next Lesson: Neural Filters

Lesson Info

The Burn and Dodge Tools

So, what we want to do is again I'm going to double click the magnifying glass use my hand to bring this over so we can see her face. Then I'm gonna unlock the background layer and then use command or control + J to create a copy so that we can non-destructively edit. And then I'm going to say burn and dodge. Now, when we go over here to our toolbar you can see a little hand and a little dodge, little spoon looking tool. Those are directly from the old light, those little dark room days when you used your hands and you used that little tool that's why they look like that. And so the burn tool, I'm gonna get that. And notice we have some options up here in the option bar and you can say, what do you want to burn? The highlights, or the mid tones, or the shadows? And so it's the dark areas in the image, the dark tones, the grays the middle gray areas, or the whites, the bright areas. That's what those are. So what we wanna do is we want to retouch some shadows on Onka's face. We're gonna...

choose mid tones. So they're not the darkest areas. They're not the brightest areas. The areas that are sort of in the middle as far as luminosity. The other thing we can do here is we can say what kind of exposure, how dark do you want this? How bright do you want this? So we're gonna take this to about 30%. I'm gonna take it actually up to about 50%. So you can see what this is doing. Now the other thing we have here we have this little tool here to turn on and off the pen tablet. I want that to be turned on or you can make this into an airbrush tool. So if you have a tablet, you can use some extra features to really control how this works. So, what I'm gonna do here is if you click, or if you touch and drag on the screen, this is going to darken the areas that you're painting on. So it's gonna just darken it. So if I paint this right here, notice it darkens this area. I'm just gonna paint. And it's darkening the whole thing. I'm way overdoing this so you can see what's happening, but it's just darkening that area. Okay. And the more you paint, the darker it gets. So that is dodging. I mean, that's burning. So that's like what you do in a dark room where you just let lots of light hit the photo paper. So I'm gonna undo that, it's a little too much for my taste. And we'll take this exposure down to maybe something realistic, like 12 or 13, maybe 16%. Maybe I just wanna darken her cheek to bring out these shadows. So I'm just gonna lightly paint on this. There we go. That's a little bit too much. It looks like she's been hit. So maybe I can undo that, control + Z, take this exposure down even more, maybe that 9% and then really lightly bring that in, bring this in. And so I'm just gonna really lightly go in here and do this a little by little by little by little, okay. That's the burn tool. And then the other thing we can do here if we choose the dodge tool, it's the exact opposite. It's gonna lighten. It's gonna lift the values. And again, you have the same options. You can choose the mid tones, the shadows, or the highlights. You can say, how much do I want this to do that? And so you wanna keep that sort of low, maybe not let's say 20, 19, 20%. You can turn on all these different options. If you have a tablet and now watch, I'm gonna go in here and do the opposite. I'm just gonna paint and see how that just gets lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter. If you do it too much, it's gonna get over exposed. You don't wanna do that but you can take this and you can lighten and darken different areas in an image using burn and dodge.

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