Dodge & burn in Photoshop

Evoke darkroom methods to finesse the monochrome look in your shots

An essential tool in darkroom printing, dodging and burning involves selectively brightening (dodging) and darkening (burning) different areas of the image, to draw the viewer’s eye to certain points. We’ve performed this process in colour, before conversion into black and white.

DODGI NG

Open your image in Photoshop and select the Dodge tool (displayed as a racquet icon) from the Tools palette. Dodging works by painting a brush over desired areas, so first select the size of the brush you need. (It’s at the top left of the screen, just underneath the menu.) Next, select Shadows, Midtones or Highlights and the Exposure required, expressed as a percentage. Then just paint the brush where the dodge effect is required on the image. To stop the image clipping, tick Protect Tones. In the image above, we’ve lifted the rocks in the foreground

[1] out of shadow and have made the castle and mound [2] lighter.

BURNING

Burning is the opposite effect to Dodging, and the parameters you can select are the same. (The icon mimics using a hand in a real darkroom.) As before, select the part of the image you need to modify and paint in the corrections required. We’ve burned in some contrast to the sky [3] and have made the clouds darker above the horizon to the right of the image [4].