Hello everybody! This is Yanik Chauvin and we’re doing a video tutorial today on non destructive dodging and burning. Now if you’re not familiar with dodging and burning, I invite you to look it up on You Tube or on Google, but I’ll briefly tell you what it’s about. It’s about using a tool in Photoshop to lighten certain areas of mini inch and/or darkening certain areas of mini inch. Dodging is for lightening up, and burning is for darkening areas of mini inch.

So, you will find those tools on the palette here, right here. And if you hold your mouth down, it gives you the title doge tool, burn tool, and these are the two tools. Now the reason why I’m showing you another way of doing this is because being a stock photographer I tend to enhance my images with some dodging and burning once in awhile when I see the need for it. And the stock sites, sometimes will refuse those images due to either artifacting or image quality. And now if you’re looking at the image at a 100% and you’re using it for personal purposes or even printing them up, it won’t really matter whether you use the classic way of dodging and burning, or the non destructive way that I will be showing you right now. But for us stock photographers, when we have agencies that are being extremely picky on quality, we have to find ways to enhance our images and have them accepted at the same time. So I searched the web and found a tutorial on non destructive dodging and burning on one of my favorite sites, DP challenge. This tutorial was posted a few years back by Monique Newton from Australia, and I just loved it. And it was a great, great tutorial. And I figured I’d bring it back to life in video mode this time. So again thank you Monique, and let’s move on.

Now the first thing we need to do to make this non destructive dodging and burning is to create a duplicate layer, sorry not a duplicate layer, a new layer. And we can do this in two ways. We can go here, in new layer, in a menu on top, layer, new layer, and this dialogue box appears. And we’ll cancel it, the other way we can do it is, let me bring that layers palette here, is by clicking, holding the alt key down and clicking on the new layer here. It’ll bring up the same dialogue box, all right. Whichever way you prefer to do it, I like shortcut keys so I’m using it that way. We’ll name it dodge and burn. Now what’s really, really important, is the layer mode. We’re going to go down and select soft light, and now the boxer changes to give us the option of 50% gray layer, and that’s what we want, that’s really, really, really important. So we need to click that, remember soft light, and then clicking the box, and clicking Ok. Now bringing the layers palette back, you’ll see that it created this 50% gray layer on top of our image, but since it’s on soft light mode, it hasn’t affected our image as of yet. What we need to do to affect the image is to darken that layer up or lightening up, and how are we going to do that, is by using our brush tool and black and white as the colors to do that, now let me move that out of the way, all right.

Now our brush tool is right here, what’s important is to make sure that you have black and white here as your foreground and background color because we’ll be switching from both. If they’re not pure black and white, you can always click on this little icon here and it’ll bring it back to black and white. We’ll start with the black as the foreground color, the color we’ll be using, so that we can burn our way through this image non destructively or in other words, darken it up. What I’ll be doing is increasing my brush size. Make sure it’s a soft brush as well, and I always like to start at around 25% opacity, but for the purposes of this video and we want to go faster, I’ll go to a 100%, how is that? And you’ll get an idea of how this works. Here we go. Now a 100% means that I’ve maxed out my burning options on this 50% gray layer. And I’ll show you in a few seconds how to make this even darker.

But first of all let’s dodge. Now to dodge, we need to switch the white color and what we’ll do is, I will not put a 100% this time. Now lower it down a little bit, lower the brush size, and just bring out some high lights in the hair, maybe down here, and maybe on the hand here a little bit, on the shoe, on the coat, and there you go. This is just an example. And let’s say this is what you’re looking for, you’ve just completed your dodging and burning. Now let me show you what the layer looks like after dodging and burning in this way. Now just select the layer, and you can see a complete black in certain areas of lighter that I’ve used on my white with my white brush, and that has dodged, if you want parts of our images. What’s great is that we can hide that layer and we can see our bottom layer which is our image and that has not been touched, so it has not been destroyed if you want.

Now if it’s not dark enough for you, there are two things, or light enough, let’s say if you’re going on the other extreme, you can always duplicate this layer by right clicking and selecting from the menu duplicate layer, and you can call it anything you want it but copy by default, and there you go. Now that’s too dark, you can always lower the opacity to what you feel is good, and then you can see how it works. Now of course that’ll affect the light areas as well, now what I suggest instead of doing that to get more control is just to do a new layer again, so alt key going down here, and just calling it d and b 2, again selecting soft light, clicking the 50% gray option ok. And now we have a new layer to work with, and going to burn and increasing the brush size, and you can start over to darken up areas that you want now. I’m just playing around here, just so you can see how it works, and this method is great. The stock photo sites, most of them anyway, will accept images this way and will not refuse them for image quality, or artifacting, compared to regular classic dodging and burning.

I hope this helped you out a little bit, stay tuned for more video tutorials. I’ll be showing you the next video, how to darken up a blue sky without using polarizer filters or neutral density filters. Until then, have a great day, and talk to you soon. Bye-bye.