Enhance mono landscapes
James Paterson shows you how to enhance landscapes and emphasize important details with selective tonal tools
Add zest to mono shots with Adobe CC
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 this technique easier with dedicated Dodge and Burn tools. The Dodge tool lets you paint to lighten areas, while the Burn tool darkens. But there are still a few settings to master if you want to get the most out of these tools.
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 nearidentical tools in Lightroom’s Develop module.
We’ll begin in Lightroom by using the Adjustment Brush, then continue the adjustments in Photoshop with the Dodge and
Burn tools. A viewer’s eye is naturally 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 adjustments. With the dodge and burn controls we can boost parts of our image, while drawing attention away from other areas. We can lift crucial details, hide distractions, emphasize textures and gently shift the balance of a photograph.
Convert to mono
When converting to mono, we can control the brightness of colours, which gives us a head start with adjustments. After importing into Lightroom, go to the Develop module and click ‘Black and White’. Use this panel to lift the yellows and darken the blues, like so.
Open in Photoshop
Right-click the image and choose, Edit in>edit in Adobe Photoshop. Once open, hit Cmd/ctrl+j to duplicate the background, so we can work on a copy of our original. Grab the Burn tool, then go to the tool options at the top and set Exposure: 10%, Range: Midtones.
Lift the water
Set the Range to Shadows then, using a small brush, paint over the crevices in the rocks to darken them, thereby emphasizing textures. Next, switch to the Dodge tool and set Range: Highlights, Exposure: 10%. Paint to lift the ridges in the rocks and to add subtle bright streaks in the flowing water.
Lighten the waterfall
Grab the Adjustment Brush from the Lightroom toolbar. Doubleclick ‘Effect’ to reset any previous settings, then dial in +1 Exposure. Paint over the waterfall and the water to lighten them. We can also crisp up the details here by increasing Clarity slightly, as shown.
Darken the edges
Using a soft-edged brush tip (right-click for brush settings), paint around the edges to subtly darken them, creating a vignette that draws the eye to the details in the centre. Next, set Range: Highlights and paint over the brightest rocks to darken them.
Add extra punch
Continue dodging and burning parts of the image to lift or darken them. You can hold Alt while using either tool to switch to the other. Finally, we can add extra punch. Click the Create Adjustment Layer icon in the Layers panel and choose Curves, then plot an S-shaped curve line.