Apply the finishing touch with dodging and burning
Once you have the basic image, take control of tone by darkening, lightening and adjusting the contrast in local areas of your image
Ligh tening, darkening and adjusting contrast of selective areas of an image to control the final result has been a part of black-and-white photography since the start of the traditional darkroom. With your digital images, you have a number of editing options to achieve these results in Lightroom, Camera Raw or Photoshop.
Starting with a raw file and using the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom or Camera Raw will give you the best results when you lighten shadows or darken highlights, as there is more detail available in a raw file compared with a JPEG; but it’s often easier to fine-tune your final adjustments in Photoshop using Adjustment Layers.
1 Camera Raw Adjustment Brush
Selecting the Adjustment Brush in Camera Raw (or Lightroom), you can simply paint over the area that you want to adjust. It’s best to start with low Flow and Density settings of around 25%, and build up the mask: you can add to or remove from this mask at any point. Then you can adjust the sliders; for this image, we increased the exposure, lightened the shadows, and increased the contrast of the hut.
2 Add a 50% grey Layer
With the image open in Photoshop, we added a new layer with the Blending Mode set to Overlay, then went to Edit > Fill and selected 50% grey. Using the Brush tool, it’s then possible to lighten areas by painting over in white, or darken them using black. Whether you’re lightening or darkening, use a very low opacity setting such as 2%, and use a soft-edged brush to ensure that your brush strokes aren’t visible.
3 Curves Adjustment Layer
Adding a Curves Adjustment Layer then painting over the Layer Mask in black on any areas of the frame you don’t want to adjust is a versatile way to lighten, darken and adjust the contrast of a specific area of the image. For this shot, we masked the hut so that the adjustment only affected the background, and used a subtle S-curve to add a little contrast.
4 Levels Adjustment Layer
Similar to the Curves Adjustment Layer, you can also use a Levels Adjustment Layer to selectively alter areas of the image. It lacks the subtlety of Curves, so it’s usually the last adjustment to apply. For this image we painted the mask to apply only to the hut, then adjusted the white and black points to make the tones match the background more accurately than before.