Discover the process of enhancing digital photos by making adjustments to highlights and shadows. This tutorial provides a comprehensive review of the burn and dodge tools and their uses in photo editing.
Key Insights
- The tutorial uses a raw photo file (sunset.arw), which allows for a higher level of detail manipulation in shadows and highlights due to minimal compression on the camera sensor.
- The burn tool and dodge tool are essential for enhancing an image's shadows and highlights, functioning similarly to a brush tool with adjustable exposure and range targeting.
- The tutorial demonstrates the destructive changes made to the photo, meaning adjustments are permanent and unable to be removed once applied, underscoring the importance of working on a separate layer.
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In this video we'll be going over highlights and shadows. Let's start by opening our file.
For this video we'll be using our sunset.arw file and click open. As we've discussed before the arw file signifies that this is a sony raw file meaning that the image has not been compressed much on the camera sensor. Therefore we have additional options before we import this into photoshop that we can make to get the most out of our image.
Typically with raw photos we'll get extra detail in our shadows and highlights that we're able to manipulate. However for this we'll simply open our image. As always the first thing that we want to do is create a new layer out of our background and let's title this layer sunset adjusted and we'll retitle our background layer sunset original and lock it.
Next let's save our file going to file save as and we'll save this as sunset adjusted and hit ENTER and ok. The first thing that we'll be doing is adding highlights and shadow adjustments to our sunset adjusted layer. If we go into our adjustments we can see that we don't have the opportunity to adjust highlights and shadows here.
Therefore we have to make these changes as destructive changes to our image. It'll be important to make sure that we have the sunset adjusted layer highlighted for these changes since they will compromise the image. In order to make these changes we'll go to image adjustments and then we'll click the bottom shadows highlights.
As you can see when the shadows highlights box comes up it already signifies an automatic change. We currently have 35 percent shadows on this image therefore let's make some adjustments. First we'll adjust the shadows pulling them up from our original zero to about 40 percent and next let's work with our highlights.
As we drag the highlights up we'll see it declines and when we get nice color in the background it looks a little bit fake so we'll bring our highlights to about 33 percent and click ok. Again as we can see in our layers we don't have an adjustments layer here so the changes we've made are now set to this image and are destructively changed. Next let's introduce two tools that we can use to help us with our highlights and our shadows.
The first tool is our burn tool found in the tools bar. This tool works similar to a brush tool where we can adjust the brush tip as well as make other changes to our hardness and our size. With this tool we can also adjust the exposure.
Currently it's set at 100 percent and adjust the range or the area that we want to target within the image. With the burn tool let's choose shadows and let's darken up some of these plants within our image. Currently that's a little too dark so I'm going to hit CTRL Z and let's bring our exposure down to about 35 percent.
If we again click we can add just a little bit of darkness to the shadows within the image. We'll go over a couple of these shadows and this will help to give it a little more contrast to the white beneath. In addition I want to add a little more darkness to this side of the hill here so we'll simply click and drag and finally down here.
Because this is such a large space I'll change the size of my cursor and hit CTRL Z to undo the work on this hillside. Let's now go to the options bar and we'll drag the size up to about 140. Then we can simply click and drag adding a little bit more darkness to this hillside and giving it a nice contrast to the white.
Oftentimes when working with a photo like this I'll adjust my tip size and spend more time being careful to highlight every highlight and darken every shadow. However in this case we can go through it quickly to see the result of this tool. With a harshness that is lower as opposed to higher you get a little more flexibility into the spaces that you can work with.
I'll add a little more darkness to some of these brighter spots simply by clicking and this looks pretty good. The next tool we'll be working with is our dodge tool. The dodge tool can be found in the gallery with the burn tool and this has the opposite effect where it will brighten parts of the image.
Let's brighten all of these white buildings with a large tip. We'll bring the size up from our options bar and in this case we're only going to highlight the mid-tones or the middle parts of the image. Let's bring the size up a little bit higher and making sure that our hardness is all the way down we'll have the most flexibility.
In addition we'll drop the exposure down to about 10% and we can just paint broad strokes across the image highlighting where we need to. If we click again and continue dragging we'll see that it will stack the dodge tool's attributes of brightness on top and so we can simply create a brighter image by clicking and dragging multiple times. For instance I'll drag over these buildings multiple times and we can see that it brightens up.
Because I only have the mid-tones selected in the options bar I'm not worried about brightening some of the shadows on the hillside so I can click on the white building here and not be too worried that it will continue on the outside of the white building. Finally I'll click on some of these edges here the buildings and as stated earlier I often might take more time on this image and a photo like this may take upwards of 30 or even 60 minutes. However it is helpful for us to go through this process quickly and see how these tools can be used to benefit our image.
Let's just add a little bit more to the bottom here and finally we're going to add a little to the top. I think this looks pretty good. Let's now compare it with our sunset original and we can see this is a great improvement to our image.
Looking back let's do one more spot on top of this building here just to bring it up from the light a little bit. And this looks pretty good. Let's go to file, save, and in the next video we'll be working with color balance.
See you there!