Dodge and Burn

James Paterson shows you how to enhance landscapes and emphasize important details with selective tonal tools

The technique of selective lightening and darkening has been central to photography for over a century. In the days of film, areas of a print could be shielded from the light of an enlarger, or ‘dodged’. Conversely, the light could be focused on to smaller areas to ‘burn’ them in. Photoshop makes the technique easier with the dedicated Dodge and Burn tools. The Dodge tool lets you paint to lighten areas, while the Burn tool darkens them. There are

a few settings to master if you want to get the most out of these tools, so we’ll run through those.

However, the Dodge and Burn tools aren’t the only features on offer in Photoshop for selective lightening or darkening. Most of us begin editing our photos in a Raw processor, like Photoshop’s Camera Raw, or the near-identical tools in Lightroom’s Develop Module. We’ll begin here by using the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom, then continue the adjustments in Photoshop with the Dodge and Burn tools.

A viewer’s eye is naturally (and subconsciously) drawn to the lighter parts of an image first, while darker areas are less scrutinized. This becomes even more important with black and white photos, which offer greater headroom for these kinds of adjustments. With the dodge and burn controls we can subtly boost parts of our image, while drawing attention away from other areas. We can lift important details, hide distractions, emphasize textures and gently shift the balance of our photograph.