Joel Tjintjelaar

As you may have read on this website, there are quite some ways to convert your image to black and white with Photoshop. For some people it ends right there, after the conversion. For me it doesn’t. There’s still a lot of editing we can do. I’m going to discuss two subjects: Dodging and Burning. These two tools can completely change your image. Why? Because this is where your own creativity comes to play, your own vision on black and white. With only these two tools, it’s possible to control every single pixel of your image. Now, let’s take a look at those tools.

What is “dodging and burning” and what does it do?

“Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships. – Ansel Adams”

Dodging and burning is a technique that has been around for quite some time. It’s something that found its origin in the darkroom. I don’t know who invented it, but I do know who made this technique to a form of art: Ansel Adams. He wrote, among other subjects, about dodging and burning in a book called “The Print”.

Enough history lessons. What is “dodging and burning”? What does it do? Dodging and burning are techniques to manipulate the exposure of certain parts of your image. Dodging means that you are increasing the exposure of a selected area: you’re making that selected area lighter. Burning does the opposite: you are decreasing, darkening, the exposure of a selected area.

Although dodging and burning is a typical darkroom technique it doesn’t mean that we, digital photographers, can’t use this technique. Photoshop is among other programs, a program that has a dodge and burn tool. So let’s take a look at it.

Dodging

Let’s start with the Dodge tool. You can find it on your toolbar, just above the Pen Tool.

There are three things you can adjust: brush, range, exposure. Let’s took a closer look at range and exposure. Range controls which tones that will be affected. There are three options under Range: Shadows, Midtones and Highlights.
- Shadows will affect the dark, almost black areas.
- Midtones will affect the middle tones, the grayish areas.
- Highlights affects the light areas of your image, the areas that already look white.

Exposure simply means how h5ly the effect will be applied on your image. I recommend using a low setting, somewhere between 2% and 8%.

Finally we have the Brush tool. I usually use a brush with a low hardness, around 10-20%. This way the transitions will be much smoother and natural.

Burning

Right click on the Dodge Tool and select your Burn tool.

The Burn Tool offers the same options as the Dodge Tool. Select Highlights if you want to make the lighter, almost white parts, darker. Select Midtones if you want the middle tones, the gray parts, darker. And finally select shadows if you’d like to make the real dark parts even darker. My exposure and Brush hardness are similar to the settings I use with the Dodge Tool.

How to apply Dodging and Burning on your images

There aren’t really any thumb rules on what your dodge and burn settings should be. It all comes down to your own creativity and imagination. I do think that subtlety is important. Using a low exposure gives you more control over an image than using a high exposure setting. Besides, subtle changes look more natural.

My workflow

Dodging and burning is something I always do when I’ve done all my other corrections. I flatten my image (right click on one of your layers and select “Flatten Image”) and I make a copy of my background image by pressing CTRL+J or go to > Layer > Duplicate Layer and hit Enter. All of my dodging and burning will be done on this new layer. By clicking on the little eyeball just left of your image, you can see the effects of the dodging and burning you’ve done.

The mistake most people make is using a much too high exposure. When you’re dodging with a 4% exposure and you’re zoomed in at a 100%, the effect of the dodging will hardly be seen at that level, while actually the effect might be pretty h5. So most people just set the exposure to a higher level. The best way to see how the dodging or burning has affected your image is by doing all the dodging and burning in a separate layer that is a copy of the background. Just turn that layer on and off the see the changes.

Just look what the Dodge Tool with a Exposure of just 7% can do. I only dodged the lower part of the pier.

Even at just 7% I feel the effect is too strong, but this is just to give you an example of the effect of dodging.

Adding a sense of depth

Dodging and Burning aren’t just to make selected area’s darker or lighter. That is quite a simple approach. We are indeed making selected area’s darker or lighter, but you must always have a goal.

Why are you making a certain area darker?

Look at the photos above. I made the lower part of the pier lighter, but how did it add anything to the picture? There are some more details visible, but overall it just looks unnaturally light. I used a 300px brush and just dodged the entire thing without any subtlety.

Don’t do random dodging and burning. Always have a goal in mind. The main reason you are dodging and burning is to add some extra sense of depth to an image or to enlarge the tonal range of an image. The best B&W photos in general have a large tonal range with deep black areas, bright whites and everything in between.

Just take a look at these pictures.

There has been some heavily dodging and burning in this picture. We have two identical pictures, but the dodging and burning made this into something different entirely. The mood has changed completely.

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