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Dodging and burning a black and white image
Dodging and burning is an age-old darkroom technique and basically it just means darkening and lightening some areas of a photograph. This is done to bring interest into certain areas of photograph and with careful mastering of this technique, one is almost able to guide the viewers eye through the image.
In Photoshop there is the burn and dodge tool, but to tell you the truth it doesn't offer much control and it is destructive.
My favourite method is to dodge and burn with using a new layer in overlay mode.
Here is a potograph that I took last week in Oulu, Finland. Even though the composition is fair enough it is not a very interesting photograph.
To make it more interesting I dodged the corners of the picture as if I was creating a block to prevent the viewer's eye not "to slip" away from the frame. Then I dodged some other areas to bring a little bit more detail in them and also brightened the musician's face and some other parts.
To do this one has to create a new layer above the main layer
of the image. Then change the layer mode to: Overlay
Then just start painting with a soft black brush where you want to darken the pixels and use white where you want to lighten the image. I advice to keep the brush fairly large, hardness at 0 and opacity between 8-15. For stronger effect one can increase the opacity. With this technique one can adjust the effect later by reducing the opacity of the new layer or creating a layer mask and painting out the parts where you made mistakes. Keep in mind that besides you can correct mistakes by painting with 50% grey over the black or white that you used.
One can also try hard light and soft light blending modes to create a little bit of a different efect.
Here is my final image.
If you have any questions regarding this or suggestions for another tutorial leave a comment on the guestbook or email me at juhamikkokinnunen(a)hotmail.com