Tutorial: Dodging and Burning

Dodging and Burning

Dodging and burning are tools that have long been in the traditional photographer's toolbox. Dodging is a process to lighten selected areas of a print by withholding light from exposing the area. Burning is the opposite - darkening selected areas of the image by allowing more light to expose the print. Dodging and burning are useful tools when trying to emphasize or demphasize certain elements of a photo, without affecting the rest of the picture. Ansel Adams was a great master of these techniques in the darkroom and the evidence can be seen in nearly all of his prints.

In digital photography, we have analogous tools for selectively lightening or darkening an image. In fact, these tools give controls that the traditional photographer does not have available. The dodge tool lightens the area while the burn tool darkens it. With Photoshop, you can set the dodge and burn tools to selectively affect only highlights, midtones, or shadows. If you want to increase contrast in an area of the image, simply select the dodge tool and choose highlights to lighten the light areas, and choose the burn tool and select shadows to darken the darker areas. This increases the contrast of that section of image. Conversely, if you want to decrease the contrast in a section of the image, dodge the shadows to lighten the dark areas, and burn the highlights to darken the light areas. This effect has numerous applications. For example, if you have an image with distracting elements in the image, such as shrubs or debris in the background, you can deemphasize these elements by reducing the contrast of the distracting element. On the other hand, if you want to bring out a particular element of the image, like the face of a person, you can increase the contrast and make it stand out of the image.

So how do you dodge and burn? First, select the dodge or burn tool. In Photoshop, it is on the tool panel located directly under the gradients tool. You can also access the tool by pressing the "o" key. Only one of the tools shows in the tool panel (either the dodge or the burn tool, or another tool called the sponge tool which we aren't discussing in this tutorial). You can access a different tool in that set by right-clicking the icon and selecting the tool you want from the menu.

Once you have selected the tool, the upper-left corner of the screen (below the menu) shows a number of settings, as shown below. The first setting you see is "Brush". This setting allows you to pick a brush size so you do not end up dodging or burning too much or too little of your image. The next option is the "Range" option. This allows you to pick the pixels of the image that the dodge or burn tool will effect. If you burn highlights you will darken areas that are lighter. If you burn shadows you will darken areas that are already dark. If you burn midtones you will darken areas that are in the middle. The same for dodge, except you lighten areas instead of darken them. The last option is the "Exposure" option. This allows you to set how intense you want the lightening or darkening to be. The default is 50%, but that is often too high. Experimenting with different exposures and brush sizes will give you a good idea of what this tool is capable of, and how to use it to produce the effect you want.

Photoshop Dodge Tool Settings

Some points of caution when dodging and burning - if you overdo it you can make the image look artificial. Because it's a local tool, you can make it seem like you took two images and pasted them together.

In the example shown below, the bicycle in the adjusted image stands out more than the original. We have used the dodge and burn tools to adjust the image in a number of ways. Midtones in the wall behind the bike were darkened, the highlights of the bike were lightened, and the shadows near the bike and flowers were darkened. An exposure of 10% was used. (Please note that in this example image, the dodging and burning tools have been used with a very heavy hand to make the effect very visible.)

Original Image	Image After Dodge and Burn Treatment