Dodge and Burning Tools

Image from the website improvephotography.com

Dodging and Burning Pro Tips in Photoshop

A brilliant article on the website improve photography.com by Brian Pex

Notes and image below, taken from – Martin Evening (2018), Adobe Photoshop for Photographers 2018 Edition. New York: Routledge.

Note

Applying the Dodge tool or Burn tool to the background layer permanently alters the image information. To edit your images nondestructively, work on a duplicate layer. For information on duplicating layers, see Layer basics.

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The dodge and burn tools in Photoshop are one of the painting tools and are used to edit the image by lightening (dodge) and darkening (burn) the pixels.

The first thing you have to do after selecting the dodge or burn icon is to choose a brush shape, this is done by going to the Brush preset Picker which is the second item from the left in the Options bar, see below:

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Once you have selected your brush you can adjust its size by using the Size slider. The sizes can be adjusted from 1 pixel to a 5000 pixel-wide brush. The standard round brush also has the option to choose the hardness or softness of the brush which is adjusted by use of the Hardness slider.