Project five: Adobe CC
James Paterson explains these essential tools for old-school image enhancements
BEFORE
The Dodge and Burn tools are ideal for selective lightening and darkening in Photoshop. There are lots of other tools that do a similar job, but there’s something about these two options that will keep you coming back to them, time and time again!
Perhaps it’s the darkroom connection. In the darkroom, areas of a print would be ‘dodged’ by shading some of the light from the enlarger bulb. A small disc on a piece of wire would often be used, an implement echoed in the Photoshop Dodge tool icon. By contrast, parts could be ‘burned’ by focusing extra light from the enlarger onto specific areas, resulting in darker tones. An ‘OK’ hand shape could be used for this, the hole between thumb and finger channelling a thin sliver of light onto the print, hence the hand-shaped icon for Photoshop’s Burn tool.
Of course, all this had to be done in the dark without any feedback until the print was developed. It took patience, tremendous skill and a good deal of trial and error to get right. Thankfully, it’s much easier now. But there’s still great skill in knowing where to dodge or burn, and how far to push it if you’re going to achieve your best results.
1 Brush basics
The Dodge and Burn tools work like brushes, allowing you to paint over areas to lighten or darken them. As such you can use the usual Photoshop brush shortcuts. The ] and [ keys let you resize the brush tip, and Shift+] or [ alters hardness. Clicking once, holding Shift and clicking again lets you make a straight line (useful for dodging things like sun rays). With either tool you can hold Alt to temporarily switch tools.
2 Set the exposure
The Exposure amount sets the strength of the tool. Keep this low, around 5-10%, and build up your brush strokes. You can use your keyboard 1-9 to set the Exposure strength to 10%, 20% and so on, and hitting 0 sets it to 100%. The Protect Tones checkbox nearby can help to prevent highlights or shadows being clipped to black or white, and also somewhat guards against colour shifts while dodging or burning.
3
