A QUICK Dodge and Burn HACK in Lightroom for All Photos

I love dodging and burning it is one of the easiest things to do and really can make a photo pop and stand out and I have a quick hack that's gonna make it super simple for you to do will Simpson here and welcome to exploring photography in this Lightroom editing tutorial I'm going to show you a quick and easy way to dodge and burn your photos to really give it that nice contrast just a quick refresh on what dodging and burning is well dodging and burning is the lightening and darkening of your photo dodging is the lightening and burning is the darkening of the photo it really helps create a 3d aspect of your your image which is flat so it's a way of really giving it dimension and really pulling the viewer into your photo without further ado let's get into this technique now I do recommend following along so if you want to open Lightroom take a photo and let's get started alright so here's my photo now I've done a basic edit on it but there is something still missing it looks great and we could probably finish with it right now but honestly we can create more dimension by dodging and burning now I found that dodging and burning generally works better when you actually work with the natural light in the photo you can you can lighten or you can dodge or lighten a dark area but it tends to work better and look more natural if you dodge or lighten the light parts of the image and burn or darken the dark part parts of the image it just seems to work better look more natural but let's go ahead and start alright so what we're gonna do is we're gonna click the brush tool in the top right of Lightroom once you have that selected double click on effect because what that's gonna do is that's gonna reset all of your settings that you have that if there's any settings on it so for example if I had contrast and highlights adjusted here if I double clicked on effect it will reset that so there's nothing changed then what we're gonna do is we're actually going to brush or some people call it to paint on the image and if you want to adjust the size of the brush you can do it here and you'll see it get bigger and smaller what I do is on my mouse I have a little wheel I can roll that up and down to change the side if you have that you can do that otherwise you can just do sighs here so we'll get a little brush here and we're just gonna paint right here now if you want to see where you're painting you can press o on your keyboard and that will show you a selection the color might be different for example mine's green if you want to change that go up to tools go to adjustment mask overlay and you can select the color here it doesn't really matter it's all personal preference my favorite color is green so I use green to turn it off press o again you can also set your adjustment for example if you up your exposure well you can see clearly where I've painted so let's go ahead and we're gonna just paint the all the landscape here and it doesn't I mean it doesn't really have to be perfect it can go over a little it really doesn't have to be too perfect so let's go ahead and get this done now once this is all done okay good now there we go we have officially dodged our image we're done looks great doesn't it yep just kidding next we're gonna remove the Dodge part of the image from the dark areas we're gonna remove the lightened part from the dark parts of that image so scroll down here on the right side to range mask off that should say off what we're gonna do is we're going to click off and we're gonna go to luminous luminance is the intensity of light so the darker the spot the less the intensity the brighter the spot the more the intensity select that now you'll see a range here on the left side is the dark parts of the image the right side is the bright parts of the image so what do we want to do we want to remove what we just painted from the dark parts of the image so we're gonna click this range and we're gonna slide it to the right towards the light part of the image now if you want to see this you can click show luminance mask if you click that it should turn it red now you can see we missed a little part here so we're gonna paint there we've missed a little part here so we're just gonna fill in those gaps and get those all filled in okay good so that looks good so now as we slide the slider from left to right you'll notice that it starts dark and it starts to pull it out of those black parts the farther we go the less yes and I think we're gonna settle right about there we're gonna go ahead and click that off good now that looks very bright but that's okay we can adjust it later so once that's done now we want to do the exact same thing for the dark parts so what we're gonna do is we're gonna scroll up here we're gonna click new and then again we're gonna double click on effect and we'll go ahead and lower the exposure quite a lot doesn't matter because we can adjust it then we're gonna paint here same place we painted for the dodging so this is going to be the burning part the darkening go ahead and paint all there remember it doesn't have to be super perfect depending on your image you can be more or less specific okay so once that's done remember you can press o to see make sure you got it all covered press o to turn that off so then we're gonna scroll down again we're gonna turn luminance mask on and this time we want to remove the dark from the light areas of the image so we want to pull the slider from right to left go ahead and do that and there you go okay good so now that that's done it does not look good but that's okay we can adjust these now so what we're gonna do is we can tell that it's way too bright so if you want to select your mask again you see these little dots this one here and this one here so I'm gonna select the exposure one that's bright one so we'll click this and you see how it's now selected and my exposure is at 2.36 that is way too bright so what we're gonna do is we're gonna lower this till we find that good point I think I think that looks good okay good now we're gonna adjust the dark so again select the dark one okay good two point two five minus two point two five super dark so let's go ahead and adjust that and let's bring out the brightness little I think darker yeah okay good there we go now that looks really good so let's take a look at the before and after if you scroll down here this little switch here turns off your brushes so this is what we're using is called a brush so this turns all of them off this is the after this is the before after before now you can really see the difference it added a lot more contrast it really gave the mountains and and rocked here a lot of depth and feel and it just brings something to the image it just adds that little extra oomph to the image which it's super simple so why not do it it takes no time at all figuring out exactly how much to dodge and how much to burn does take a little practice but that's okay because it's super quick and you can easily adjust them as needed but it really makes the image look much better and it's super simple it takes no time at all it just took a little time here because I wanted to really show you each step we're gonna go ahead and do one more photo and this time I'm just gonna go through a really fast I'm gonna start a timer and we'll see how long it takes me to do it so here we go starting timer now alright so first step click the brush double click effect ah okay start again click the brush double click effect make the brush really big paint on the entire area of the forest we're gonna raise this gonna raise this for the dodging go down here luminance mask this is taking me longer than I expected take it out of the dark areas perfect new double-click do the paint all over the image let's go to luminance take it out of the light way too dark and we're gonna do 50 let's check the light that's a little too bright okay actually that looks good all right done so that took me one minute to do and actually I fumbled quite a bit so let's look at the before and after here before sorry after before after now you could make the darks a little bit darker on this one so let's go ahead and darken those just oh wait did I brighten both whoops all right the let's actually darken these here oh there we go oh that looks so much better okay good now we're talking good so before after can't even talk anymore after before there we go that looks much better good you see and you could adjust the brightness here I think it's a little too bright so we're gonna lower this just a hair there we go good I think that looks really nice yeah you see how it looks just more contrasting and kind of pulls you into the image the dark parts seem like they're they have the depth and the bright part to stand out so that's that's really simple it took me a minute to do that with practice you'll become faster and faster but that's a really quick dodge and burn technique that you can use on all every photo even sometimes on skin it takes a little bit more practice but it is doable and there we have it that's a quick and easy hack for Lightroom dodging and burning that can really up your photo game and in this time of quarantine I hope you're doing well and getting lots of editing practice I hope this can help you make your your photos really stand out I look forward to seeing what you create if you do use this technique and post it on Instagram I would love to see them tag me and use hashtag exploring photography that way I can see them and as always don't forget to enjoy the journey that is exploring photography see you guys next time just follow along with me that's just too much out of those parts of the image if that makes sense no it doesn't make sense

Channel: Will Simpson - Exploring Photography

Views: 6,471

Keywords: a quick, dodge and burn, hack in lightroom, for All Photos, will simpson, exploring photography, willsbeenhere, photoshop, lightroom, dodge, burn, lightroom editing, dodge and burn lightroom, how to dodge and burn in lightroom, luminous masking, range masking, dodging and burning, lightroom beginner, lightroom tutorial, photo editing, dodge & burn, lightroom editing tutorial, photo editing lightroom, landscape photography, dynamic range, editing hack, editing tips, contrast

Id: _xTzO4BkHeY

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020