“TOAST! Tim and Ally…. Really?” “Erm yes…It really does help with Dodge and Burn tools. We’ll get to that later but first things first.”

Dodge and burn tools have become a bit old hat to many photographers. With so many quick and easy digital ‘fixes’ it’s easy to see why, but these tools, although going back to traditional printing times, are some of the best ways to make your black and white images (and colour too) look amazing. We can safely say that there is not an image on our blog that doesn’t use at least one of these in some way or other. See our tips and geeky explanations for what makes a good black and white image.

Dodge and burn in traditional printing

In traditional printing, you have an enlarger which projects your negative onto paper. The more light you expose the paper to through the negative, the darker the print will be. After you’ve done a test strip, which helps you work out the required exposure, you would then expose the light from the enlarger onto your paper. Depending on the exposure, there can often be areas of the image that would be too dark or too light. You would then do another test strip over those areas to work out that exposure time. Dabbling or jumping into film photography – see our post on the best film for travel photography and filters for black and white photography.

Dodging

When it comes to the final exposure of the print, you would expose for the final image with adjustments, but for the area that was too dark and needed less time, you would use a piece of card, normally attached to a piece of wire to wave madly over that area to prevent light getting to it – well maybe not madly, but moving enough to prevent a hard edge being projected onto the paper. This lightening technique is called dodging.

Dodging the print with cardboard ellipses on sticks

The further away from the paper you manipulate the light, the softer the dodged or burnt area edges will be.

Burning

For the area that needs more light, you would expose the image with the normal exposure, then you would give the area the needs more light, the extra light that it needs. How do you do that? Well, depending on the size and shape of the area, you can use your hands cupped together to block out the light and only allow certain areas to get extra light, or you could also use a piece of card with a hole cut in it to give that area more light … directing (or burning) the light. Again you wave it gently between the enlarger and the paper (to prevent getting a hard edge).

Burning in areas by giving them extra exposure through the cardboard hole

Pro tip:

Now one of the advanced traditional techniques used by traditional film printers is to dodge or burn with a different contrast. This is done by using multi-grade paper and changing the grade filter on the enlarger lens before dodging or burning. This technique allows you to have a combination of high and low contrast so for example in your scene you might need more contrast in the sky to get awesome looking clouds but the foreground needs sensitive shadow and highlight detail so a lower contrast.

Dodge and burn in Photoshop or Affinity photo

Now digitally, the darkroom effect can be applied in Photoshop. In your toolbar, normally down the left-hand side, you should see what at first glance looks like a lollipop. This is in fact a version of the round piece of card on a piece of wire or stick, used in dodging. Click and hold that and you’ll see 2 other icons and the text. We’re not going to look at the Sponge tool but the Burn tool has a hand with a hole made with the fingers and the thumb. This is depicting one of the options you can use when burning in!

When you choose any of these you will see your options along the top menu change to something like this.

This means that you can control how much dodging / burning you will do to your image with the exposure, and what tones you will affect, such as Highlight, Midtones or Shadows.

Most of the time you will need midtones, but if the area you wish to adjust is in the highlights or shadows, you then choose the appropriate Range from here. Choose a brush size and click and drag around the area you wish to lighten / darken. Be careful not to overdo it and use a brush bigger than you think. Undo is your friend here!

So where on earth does toast come in?

Well a lot of people get confused with which one darkens and which lightens.

The easiest way to remember this is:

If you burn the toast it will go darker – hence Burn darkens – easy to remember now.

Dodge and Burn in Raw (adjustment brushes)

There are a number of reasons to dodge and burn using adjustment brushes in the Raw file converter but the 2 main ones ore these.

• This is a non-destructive technique so you can always come back and re -edit the image at a later stage.
• You can use the dodge and burn with contrast adjustments like the advanced traditional film technique mentioned above.

In Adobe Photoshop (CS6 or CC) Open your Raw image in the Raw file converter and navigate to the adjustment brushes. It’s along the top.

Paint the area you wish to dodge and burn and then adjust the settings on the right hand side. We usually use the clarity slider to add contrast when needed and the contrast slider to reduce contrast.

Do a new adjustment for each area you wish to work on. (Not sure about Photoshop or Affinity – see our post which gives the lowdown on them). See also our Top Photoshop shortcuts.

Putting it into practice

We photographed the tower on the City wall in Dubrovnik, Croatia, but the original looks so uninspiring that a bit of Dodging and Burning was required.

• The sky was quite tricky as while the whole area needed darkening, some parts needed less contrast and some more. We did this with 2 large burning in areas with adjustment brushes. Both darkened with the Exposure slider but one added contrast with the Clarity slider while the other reduced contrast with the Contrast slider. See our post about dramatic skies.
• The sea was burned in and had added clarity
• The tower was dodged to lighten it but with added clarity to show detail in the texture.

Original image

Areas we adjusted with the brush

Final result

Revolutionise your new images and give new life to old ones

Dodging and burning has been used by film photographers since photography was invented and it’s still one of the best ways to get what you want from an image. Give your new images that exquisitely beautiful look you have admired in the masters printers work or add new life to old photographs.

Mostly, enjoy what you do.

If you are in the London / Essex / Suffolk area, we run training at your office / premises in Photoshop. Want to buy Photoshop – click the Adobe image at the bottom of this page from this link.

The post How toast can help you to create awesome B&W images with Dodge and Burn tools appeared first on ImageExplorers.

The Tombs of the kings before and after image is of a UNESCO World Heritage Site about 2 km from Paphos Harbour. Many of the tombs date back to the 4th century BC. It has nothing to do with kings! The name comes purely from the magnificence of the tombs.  There are a lot of ruins obviously, some more interesting than others. But if you go down underneath some of them there are some amazing images to be made. One in particular, with lots of pillars, with the golden light coming through was beautiful. We visited the site late in the day so the light was streaming in at an angle.

Drag the centre line to see the difference

The problem image

The problem with the scene is that I wanted a bit of detail in the bright sunlit areas as well as in the darker bits. Most cameras have a range of light that the sensors can record. This is known as the camera’s dynamic range. Using Raw you can access a greater range of light, than photographing as a jpg will give you. I exposed my image so I definitely had a bit of detail in the highlights and then ‘pulled back’ the details from the shadows in Adobe camera Raw. I used a manual setting on the camera so as not to overexpose the highlights as the camera can lie to you about exposure.

To create more atmosphere, we kicked up some of the dust so it was hanging in the air. Unfortunately this didn’t give us the ‘correct’ looking light streaming through the haze so we added it in later in Photoshop.

Let me show you the steps we took with this Tombs of the Kings before and after tutorial. It is done in Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop but could easily have been done in Affinity Photo. Click the link to see our favourite Photoshop Shortcuts.

Into Camera Raw

Original out of camera image before adjustments

So straight into Adobe Camera Raw. (Quick tip: Instead of double clicking an image to open it in Raw try right-clicking it. This allows you to choose to open it in the Raw file converter without waiting or Photoshop to open first.)

Setting the base adjustment

Adjusting the exposure is not the way to get effective results

If you just adjust the exposure you will find that the highlights also get lighter. This is similar to what would happen if your camera was set to auto and the camera would try to lighten the large dark area.

Use the Highlights, Shadow, Clarity and Vibrancy sliders to set a base exposure

Instead of adjusting the exposure a lot, I pulled the Highlights slider down to darken the lighter areas, the Shadows slider up to lighten the darker areas, and the Clarity slider up to to get as much texture in the rock as possible. Finally I added lots of vibrance to bring out the colour of the rock.

Selective lightening with the adjustment brushes

Go to the adjustment brushes tab along the top of the screen (it’s a brush icon) and paint an area you wish to adjust. I painted a large area (where I put the green circle) and then changed the settings on the right until I liked what I saw. All the white dots you see are where I added a new brush adjustment. The red dot in the red circle is the active brush.

Adding your own lighting

I was still not happy with the light rays, so I decided to create my own. I will be dedicating a full tutorial to this technique but basically I made a selection where I wanted the rays to be, added a solid white adjustment layer and then feathered the mask. Finally I reduced the opacity of my new ‘ray’ so it’s barely visible.

Final Image

Tombs of the Kings in Cyprus

So to sum up the edit of the Tombs of the Kings Before and After image.

• Photograph in manual
• Do your initial Raw edit with the whole image in mind
• Use adjustment brushes to ‘dodge’ and ‘burn’ areas until the image you envisaged appears.
• Possibly add extra lighting you were unable to capture in camera.

I was really happy with the final result as it was just how I had envisaged the final photograph.

The big question is! Is this a “cheating” image, as I added in the rays that were not visible? Well… I think that it reflects what I saw when I stood there but you might think differently.

The post Tombs of the Kings – Cyprus – Before and After Image appeared first on ImageExplorers.

The light meter in your camera is a very useful tool, but there are times when you need to know that it’s actually lying to you. So how you can overcome it? Exposure compensation to the rescue.

Firstly, let’s look at what the camera light meter sees. The light meter shows a scene as being correct when it averages to perfect grey. Great for most images but it means that if you’re trying to photograph a white polar bear in snow your camera will give you the perfect exposure reading to make the snow and bear a mid-grey. This is a perfect time for exposure compensation. By adding 1, 2 or even 3 stops of light we can make the grey go white and compensate for the camera’s incorrect exposure. Exactly the opposite for a black cat sitting on a black mat. We need to give the camera less light than it thinks it needs so that the cat will look black and not come out grey.

“But I don’t photograph polar bears and my cat is already grey”, I hear you cry!

Okay, so how about a sunset or sunrise? All that sun shining directly into the lens as well as a dark foreground, can fool the camera into giving you an exposure that results in an image which doesn’t look like you envisaged it.

Without exposure compensation (the camera’s ‘correct’ exposure), on this image of shipwreck in Cyprus, the sky looks too light

By using exposure compensation on the shipwreck in Cyprus we can make the sky more pleasing, but everything else is too dark, but we then use dodge and burn techniques to correct this. See image at end of post.

How about the photograph of your loved one standing on a beach in the shade of a palm tree? The camera looks at the scene and makes its exposure decision based on the sunny background so the small person in shade in the front is too dark but the bright sunny background is perfectly exposed.

Correct exposure doesn’t always mean a pleasing image

So how do we fix this?

Well, if you’re photographing in manual mode, you can just adjust your shutter, aperture or ISO a few stops to compensate for this. If you are photographing in an auto mode like aperture or shutter priority, or even program mode, then most cameras have an exposure compensation button.  This allows you to over or underexpose a scene to compensate for the camera’s light meter.

So far so good but sometimes you want the perfect exposure for the bright sunset so the sky looks beautiful. Not only that but you also want the dark foreground to look bright and vibrant too.

Well there are various ways you can have your cake and eat it.

Option 1 – Bracketing

This means taking 2 or 3 (or more) images of exactly the same shot with different exposures. Most cameras have a bracketing function built in, where it will take a number of shots, a number of stops over and under your original choice of exposure.

So what next? You open Photoshop and this is where the magic happens! Photoshop will allow you to merge these multiple images into an HDR file so you can have details in the dark as well as light areas.

Using 2 images of different exposures (circled in red) to create a third HDR image

Although one can do this in Photoshop, (you get there by selecting multiple images in Bridge and choosing Merge to HDR from the tools and Photoshop sub-menu), I would recommend using a different piece of software. Aurora HDR 2018 seems to give much more pleasing results than Photoshop.

Option 2 – Dodge and Burn

Use an image that shows the most detail in both areas. Lighten the darker areas with either a dodge tool in Photoshop or an adjustment brush in Raw (much better quality). Now darken the light areas with a burn brush in Photoshop or an adjustment brush in Raw. See our before and after tutorial of Queen Carolines Temple in Hyde park.

Similar image from shipwreck set –  with a bit of dodging and burning in Photoshop Raw to bring the ship and rock details to life

Option 3 – Shadows/Highlights

In Photoshop there is an adjustment setting in the adjustment menu called the Shadows/Highlights. This amazing adjustment allows you to lighten the darker areas and darken the light areas of an image. (You can achieve a similar result in Raw with the Shadow and Highlights sliders. You will also need to up the Saturation and Contrast a bit.)

Correct exposure doesn’t always mean a pleasing image – image copyright Adobe

Using the Shadows/Highlights tool as a form of Exposure Compensation

Finally, if your images show too much detail in the shadows and highlights area there are numerous ways of increasing contrast to get more “punch” but a quick trick is to use the Dehaze tool in Photoshop Raw. See a video tutorial here and our favourite Photoshop shortcuts here.

The post Why Your Camera Lies to You – Exposure Compensation appeared first on ImageExplorers.