Dodge and Burn

The dodge and burn tools are an enormously useful pair of utilities that allow you to adjust the exposure in very specific parts of your images, making areas of your image lighter or darker as you wish.

Unlike a global exposure-adjustment tool, or the Levels or Curves tools, they only affect the parts of the image you brush over.

So you might have a portrait shot of someone which would be perfect but for the lighting on the left side of their face; the dodge and burn tools are perfect for adjusting these minor flaws. The dodge tool lightens areas of your image; the burn tool makes them darker.

Note: the following screenshots are taken from Adobe Photoshop. The dodge and burn tools, however, are common to virtually every photo-editing package, including the GIMP, which is freeware.

This shot of a monkey is generally well-exposed, but because there’s a lot of light coming from behind our subject, the edges have become a little indistinct: an effect not helped by the fact that the light has diffused through the monkey’s fur. Using the burn tool we can reduce the exposure on these edges.

This is the dodge toolbar. The drop-down menu on the far left allows you to select pre-determined settings you’ve created yourself.

The Brush: command allows you to choose the size of your brush.

The Range: command is what makes the dodge and burn tools so useful. If you choose Highlights, the brush will only affect the brightest parts of your image.

Likewise, Shadows affects only the darkest areas, while Midtones affects those tones in between. This useful command allows you to work on edges between light and dark areas without affecting them both at the same time.

The Exposure: setting is the most crucial aspect of the tools. If set to 100%, it will add or subtract 100% of the brightness of the area you’re working on. Most of the time, anything above 10% is too much, but as you use the tools more and more you’ll find it easier and easier to get to grips with.

Even with Highlights selected, a little precision never hurts when it comes to photograph editing, so zoom into the area you want to change. We’ll start with the arms, which are suffering from a halo effect thanks to the light bleeding through from behind.

We need to use a relatively small brush size, and it’s important that we add no more exposure than we absolutely need. There’s no need to measure how much you need – you’ve got the “Undo” button on your side, but as a rule of thumb, keep the exposure setting down to under 10%. If you’re working with areas that are either very dark or very light, be even more sparing: stick to 5% or less. In this case we’ve chosen 7%.

The “before” and “after” shots of this area show some subtle differences – the edges of the monkey’s arms look more defined and sharper.

It’s time to move onto the head. The principal remains the same – stop if your image is showing particularly drastic changes, and use a brush size proportional to the size of the area you’re working on.

Uh-oh. If your image starts to look streaky or smudged, you’ve got the settings for your dodge or burn tool wrong. This kind of effect is indicative of setting the exposure setting too high – remember, 10% is a safe maximum in almost all cases.

We’ve also gone over the edge that we wanted to darken, and in doing so have darkened the background as well.

A key point to remember with the dodge and burn tools is that their effectiveness is drastically reduced if you use them on non-textured surfaces, such as sky, or solid blocks of unfocused colour – this is why the smudged background looks so terrible here. Stick to using them on textured areas of your images, such as, in this case, fur.

This is the finished image. At first glance it doesn’t look strikingly different to the original: this is a good thing.

When working on your image, make sure you literally keep sight on the big picture – continually zoom out and look at the image full-screen. If your changes are obvious on a computer screen they’ll look atrocious once your image is actually printed. A final word of advice: making any changes with Photoshop’s brushes is hugely simplified if you use a graphics tablet.