CREATING DEPTH | DODGING/BURNING

[Music] hello hello everybody welcome to another processing video it's amazing what a shave and a haircut will do actually look reasonably respectable today sometimes I clean up okay what I'm gonna be covering today is somewhat similar to my last video dodging and burning again the reason why I'm doing so much dodging and burning in my images especially lately is because the light has just been so flat I haven't had any kind of directional lights to give images their depth now if you watched my last video buried in snow and if you haven't seen it I'll leave a link up here as I kept saying throughout the whole video the light is really flat and and it was really flat it just doesn't doesn't give the the added depth that you need in your photographs to draw you know the viewers eye into it now there are some photographers that work with flat light very well I've there's one that comes off the top of my head and that's Theo Bob's bomb and if you don't know of Theo you should check out his website I'll leave a link down below he has he's an amazing photographer and a lot of his images utilizes quite flat light with snow and a lot of white and I just love his photography so check him out but in this video I'm going to be adding the illusion of depth and light by just some simple techniques dodging burning and lightening certain areas to draw the viewers eye into them so without further delay why don't we get right into processing this image all right okay this is the image that I'm going to process today the brightest spots in this whole image kind of up here there's two bright spots here another one here and this is quite bright down here but there's no contrast and there's nothing really to lead you into into the frame now the first thing I usually do with any image is kind of of defined to myself well what it what is the main subject what what is it that I want to do with this photograph with this particular image my intention was to frame these two trees with these two larger trees and that's what I've done so the main subject for me is these these two main trees in the center here so how do I draw people's attention to those two trees well we can work in tones generally speaking brighter tones will attract more attention than say darker tones so what I'm going to do with this photograph is brighten this whole central portion of the image and dark on the outside but I'm also going to give the trees a bit more contrast and definition if i zoom in here you'll notice that this central tree here looks somewhat a little bit brighter on one side than the other now there wasn't really any kind of side lighting I think it's just the the shading of the the actual bark itself one side is just darker than the other I don't think it was any kind of light mind you if you look up here it could be ambient light come from coming from the sky either way that's what I'm going to work with so I'll be doing a lot of dodging and burning again I'll be dodging the edge of this tree and burning in the sides of these trees to you know give the illusion of depth now this tree here that doesn't have any kind of bright areas of dark areas it's pretty even right across the board so I'll be dodging this side quite a bit to also give the illusion that there's a little bit of light hitting this tree and it'll add depth to the whole image this side here are probably darken I probably won't brighten any part of that the snow here I really like this curve here you'll notice that it's slightly darker in here and brighter here by here I'll be doing some dodging and burning in those areas just to give it a little bit more definition and you know if you zoom in it onto the snow there is texture there but again because the light is so flat you just can't see that texture and of course as we get to the central area here there is texture but it's it's very hard to see because it's just no light the other part in the image that was somewhat unavoidable is this branch here now I did try to compose it so that the branch was behind this this tree here in the foreground but every time I move to the right to try and hide it I'd end up cutting off some of this tree and I didn't want to cut these trees off because they're the main subject so I'll probably have to do quite a bit of cloning to get rid of that and that's probably the main reason why I'm gonna be doing most of this image in Photoshop today if that branch wasn't there then I would probably just process the whole image in Lightroom but the cloning tool in Photoshop is a little bit more accurate and it's a little bit easier to use and get rid of major items such as this so but before I put it into Photoshop it's going to do some basic adjustments on this photograph so we'll just go over to the basic panel here now as far as temperature goes it was actually quite cool looking today that that day no III quite liked cool tones but I'm gonna I'm gonna leave it relatively warm on this one I mean I pretty much want to just kind of neutralize the color of the whites I don't want them to yellow and I don't want them to blue so you got to kind of play around with a slider I mean that looks pretty good it looks pretty good when they open it actually tint again I'm just going to put it at zero exposure well I I don't really need to do anything with exposure I mean that the image is very flat I'm not clipping any of the highlights or the shadows so we're just gonna leave that contrast what we're gonna be adding contrast by dodging and burning but I was going to leave that for now and and pretty much all of these sliders I'm just gonna leave a zero so I don't need to do an awful lot right now with those lens correction now this was a 16 to 35 millimeter lens which is an excellent lens and I don't get really I don't get any chromatic aberration with this lens but I'll click that anyway in able profile Corrections as I said before I mean it doesn't hurt to click it but in this case it doesn't really hurt to not click it either because I'm gonna be darkening the edges beginning but I'll just leave it click for now and I just noticed when I zoomed in here you'll notice that there is a little I mean it's minor but I'll just go back to the basic here and just reduce the highlights although the whites a little bit there we go just get rid of that okay and as far as sharpening goes let's just zoom in here at 100% so we'll go to detail again noise reduction I don't need noise reduction its ISO 100 there's there's no noise in this image whatsoever sharpening again your best not to over sharpen it I mean you should sharpen it a little bit but don't overdo it again I'm going to use the same technique as before detail right up to a hundred percent radius 0.5 and I'm just going to slide that up just a little bit there aren't any really blank areas that shouldn't be sharpening the snow there is but there is a bit of detail in there but I - what I'm going to do I'm going to press option or alt and hold it down and then just mask out those areas just a little bit okay all right so that's a pretty boring flat image but I assure you by the time we finished with it it should look a hundred times better all right so I'm just gonna right click on that and edit in Adobe Photoshop okay I've opened up the the image in Photoshop okay now this branch here is gonna take a little bit more work and I don't want to spend you know half an hour of you watching me clone this out so so I'll just do a couple of little sections here so you get an idea of where I'm taking samples so the first thing I'm going to do is make the brush a little bit bigger I'm going to soften it just a tad and for this bit here I'm going to take sample right next to the to the the branch here so option click and then move over and just start painting over the branch here I'm gonna take another sample up here so you notice that slightly darker so the idea is I'm gonna I'm just going to get rid of everything in here including this section up here so I'm gonna have to rebuild this tree a little bit and do something back here and also get rid of this stuff here okay I'm not going to go through the whole thing with you otherwise you'll be bored to tears so why don't I just clone all this out and then we'll get back into the dodging and burning okay now I think I'm done with the the cloning I did a half decent job this is where the the branch was right here one thing I should have done before I started cloning was made a duplicate layer because cloning is quite destructive to the file and that's something I usually do but for whatever reason I forgot this time so I apologize for that so make a duplicate layer and then do your cloning on top so if anything goes wrong you can just delete that layer and then and just start all over again right now on to the fun stuff okay so my first instinct is to draw people or the viewer into the background here and towards these trees here so how do we do that well I'd like to brighten up this as far as possible without blowing out any of the highlights and there's a number of ways that we can do that but I think what I'm going to do here is just use a bit of masking with with curves so the way that we do that is okay so we open up the curves here now you'll notice up in the corner here there's a hand with a couple of little arrows I'm going to click on that and if I click on the area that I want to brighten so I want to brighten up this area here so I'll hold down my mouse button and you notice as they dragged my mouse up you also drag up the the curves and the whole image starts to go brighter just fine for now like that and then we want to make a little bit of contrast in here so this is the dark dark area here and you'll notice as I move my pointer around it creates these it shows you where where that tone is on the curve I only made one here so what I'm going to do here is just drag this down to create more contrast and you can see already if you click on the eye here we've already created quite a bit more contrast to give the the image depth now if i zoom out you can see that it's has quite a bit more life in the in the image the only problem is is that it's affected the whole the whole photograph and I don't necessarily want to brighten and add contrast to the whole photograph especially in here starting to get really really white and I don't necessarily want it that white so we just close that for a sec so what I'm going to do is if you click on the the mask here that's with the layer and then press command I or ctrl I on a on a PC that'll invert the mask and the adjustments are still there it's just that we've Mark's masked them out and if you press on the shift key and click on that mask you can you can still see the adjustment there okay now we're going to do is I'm going to get a paintbrush and paint some of those adjustments back into the photograph so we'll go over to here and pick the paintbrush or or press B for brush and we're going to use a white paint so either click on X to change the the paint color or just go over there and physically click it with your mouse and as far as opacity goes I think we're going to start off with 30% so you can go up here and and dial in 30 or just press 3 on your on your keypad and see how that's changed it to 30 now as far as the paintbrush goes again if you didn't watch my first video I don't use a lot compared I use a mouse so to change the size and the the feathering and hardness of the brush I press ctrl option or I guess that's Control Alt on a PC and if I slide the mouse to the right and left it changes the size if I go up and down it changes the hardness so I want it feathered so I'm going to go down to 0 and as far as size goes that should probably do it like that and then I'm just going to start to paint in the areas where I want to add that adjustment that I made so this is primarily where I want it in this area here and in here so just keep painting over that slowly again your best not to do everything all at once but just slowly build up on these things and see the gradual change and again if you go too far all you have to do is press X so press X go back to a black paint and you can go back to your mask and you can reverse what you've just painted in so if I paint that with a black mask now it'll just get rid of that effect okay so we'll just keep painting that in and then if i zoom out and click on the eye here you can kind of see that we're slowly building up the brightness and the background maybe up a little bit in here great that's pretty good okay now what I'm gonna do is just gonna zoom in again now I want to create the illusion that there's a little bit of light hitting this tree a little bit of this one here and this one here I want to create you'll notice how this tree of the background and this one almost merged into one cuz of the same terminology so I want to brighten this tree here in the foreground to create some separation between that one and this one but first I'm going to start off with with these two trees here so I could either just dodge and burn it which is not a bad way to do it or I could repeat what I just did with that first layer so I'm gonna open up a curves layer now if you don't have this panel here you can just go down and pick curves this it's the same thing so we've got a curves layer whoops and it's gonna zoom in just a little bit and what I'm going to do here pick the hand with the arrows now I want this to have more contrast so I'm going to brighten up that section to where I want it and then this section I'm going to slowly bring it down to create that contrast again that looks pretty good and we'll just click on the mask here okay command I to invert the mask on a Mac or ctrl I on a PC and B for brush we're at 30% we have a white brush gonna make the brush a bit smaller here and then I'm going to start painting this in here and that's it we can go up a little higher go up to 40% just zoom out a bit and you can see that it's brightened up that area considerably but also added a dark area here okay now on this tree here I want to also give the illusion that there's a bit of ambient light hitting the side of this to give it more depth now in this case what I'm going to do is just use a bit of dodging so how do we do that well with the panel here I can just press on the on the Dodge button here and that creates the layer for me or you can just make your own layer and got to soft light and be for brush make sure it's on white and I'm going to start off with just 10% so 1 press 1 on your keyboard or go up here and put 10% and what I'm going to do for this is okay my brush is quite soft it's at zero now instead of going up and down with a brush what I'm gonna do is just click I'm gonna get close to the edge here and just click it once and then I'm gonna go down to the bottom here hold down the shift key and then click again and that'll actually do this whole section in a straight line for me now this works great but you have to be careful that you don't go over otherwise you'll get a bright edge along the the tree here I'll give you an example I will just go way up to a hundred percent here and say I'm dodging this this edge of the tree here if I if I click that there at the top and then hold down the shift key and go too far over the edge watch what happens you'll see that it will bleed over into the background and we don't want that so what we really want to do is just back off from the edge just a tad maybe maybe there and then if I go down here hold the shift key and click you'll notice well it's still pretty close to there so you have to be really careful with this and that's why it's good to do do it in in small sections rather than trying to do it all at once that's why I always start off at around you know 10% so we're just dialing 10% up here I click once there hold down the shift key when you do that a number of times so right now I'm just holding down the shift key and going back and forth up and down now you don't want to overdo it that might be too much you know well so the reason why I'm doing it on this side of the tree instead of this side is because we want to draw people into the center of the frame and we want it to be consistent with the rest of the photograph so this the right side of the tree here is brighter than the left so we'll keep it the same on this side now these trees here I'll probably just leave dark because you know if you think about it light would be coming in from the side here behind these trees and it wouldn't really be necessarily hitting the front of these trees here just the sides of this one and this one and a little bit of that one there okay now that I've done the the foreground tree here I'm gonna do the same thing with this treatment add a little bit more side lighting and also this second tree behind so I'm going to use a different layer for each of the trees so I pick a dodge layer again and we've got a white brush we're at 10% now I'm gonna have to make this brush just a little bit smaller here something like that might do so just click on there once and hold down the shift-key and voila that you once was probably enough like I said you don't want to overdo it and I'm gonna do the same thing on this one except I'm gonna pick a lower opacity I'm actually going to go 0.77% so to do that you'd press 0 7 or you just got there and put 7 in there and again I'm just going to click at the top here the top of the tree and hold down the shift key and click with the mouse let's do that a couple more times I should do it let's see and there we go there's your there light hitting the side of the trees and that one in the foreground okay now now what I'd like to do is just create a little bit more definition between the shadows and the highlights in the foreground here so again I'm going to open up another Dodge layer soft light and I'm still going to use 7% with this one so I'm gonna make the brush just a tad bigger and I'm going to paint this area in here just slightly and a little bit in this area to create a little bit more depth in this shadowed area so we'll just paint that through there it's gonna be so slight that you think it you're putting in is not doing anything but it's actually doing more than than what you think so if we go up to that layer now and click on the eye there you can see how much it's changed the foreground a little bit more that looks pretty good ideally we want the foreground to be just a little bit darker than the mid-ground and then finally up here this is the brightest area in here so what I can do here is going to create another dodge layer just going to zoom in a little bit here beef a brush and I'm just gonna dodge this just a little bit in here to create kind of a bit of contrast between the foreground and the mid ground here and then just do a little bit more up here then we'll just zoom out and have a look at that yeah it looks alright I think I might just do a little bit more in the foreground here yeah it looks good okay I'm just gonna make one more dodge layer here soft light and I'm just gonna brighten up the the snow on the tree just a little bit we're good at ten percent so one or just dial in ten brush is soft zero and we have white we've picked white and I'm just gonna paint that in okay that looks pretty good okay so now I'm going to do a little bit of burning so darken some areas in here so create another layer and go to soft light again but this time we're gonna use black so it's that's already on black Xchange black white 10% and what I'd like to do with the black is just darken the edges on this tree and also darken them on this tree here so I'm gonna use the same technique just going to click once and then hold down the shift key and then just keep going up and down like I'm still holding the shift key and I'm just clicking at both ends and same with this one so I clicked on the top shift key and you'll note you can see how it's getting darker and if I check out the what I've done you can see it's quite quite a bit okay I'm nearly finished with the dodging and burning in here I'm just going to zoom in on this little area here and I just want to darken this little a little bit so I'm gonna create another layer here get a soft light there's B for brush make sure it's on black 10% and I'm just gonna burn this in a little bit there we go and if we clicking on the eye here we can see how much we've burnt it in okay they'll do one more thing I'm going to do in Photoshop before I take it into Lightroom again is it's gonna go on to the levels here and I do this with all my photographs I don't know if it's really that necessary I just have this habit of doing this I bring the highlights and the shadows up as far as I can before they get blown out so I just click on this little box here just to make it a little the histogram a little bit more accurate and you'll notice that my highlights I've still got a little bit of wiggle room there before I start losing any highlights so I bring this slider all the way down and they'll brighten up the image the shadows are fine I'm well maybe I'll bring them up just a tad so we shadows darkening a little bit and then the mid-tones I'll go to 1.04 and if i zoom out oops I can't zoom out that okay we just close that and if i zoom out you can see that it's added a little bit of contrast and it's brightened it up a little bit okay so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to take all of these layers and make them into a group so I hold down the shift key and click on this bottom layer here that I'll select all of them and then command G on a Mac or ctrl G and then I'll make the whole everything into a group and if you click on the I there you can see everything that I've done to the photograph for the dodging and burning anyway okay now what I'd like to do is I'm gonna add a little bit of atmospheric haze in there and again this is using the the Michael Orton effect so if you hold down the shift alt control key on a PC and then press E or on a Mac and B shift option command key that'll copy everything into one layer so everything that we've done is now in this layer now I go up to filter blur Gaussian blur now a lot of photographers use this effect there isn't really a right way to do it this is the way that I do it and I find it quite effective I keep the blurriness of the Gaussian blur down to just under 40 and then I'll open up a brightness and contrast layer just click on this little box here so it just affects this the blurry blurry layer and then just move this out the way here I'll just jack up the brightness and the contrast now we'll just click OK we'll just close that for a second here go down to the layer here and we'll just lower the opacity and again usually I go 17% or lower you don't want to overdo it that's pretty good now if we click on the the brightness of contrast if you don't like the effect you can just open it up and just play around with it I don't want to brighten the image up too much a natural fact I'm actually lowering the brightness let's see here maybe not I don't like it right there ok now what I do is make these two items or these two layers into a grouping so I'll just hold down the command key and click on that and then command G or ctrl G and make it into a group you know that I have a group I'm just going to add a mask to that that group B for brush and X turn us into black paint the opacity I'll make 40% so press four they're gonna alter the brush size and I'm just gonna paint the foreground here because I don't want the effect the blurriness on the the foreground here so much I'm just trying to affect this central part and the background here okay I think that's pretty good okay now I've pretty much done everything that I wanted to do in Photoshop most of this stuff you know you could do in Lightroom and it would be just as as effective the only thing that I really wanted to do in in Photoshop was to clone out that the branch the cloning tool in Photoshop is quite a bit more effective than Lightroom if it hadn't been for that I would have processed this whole image in Lightroom but there is the radial tool in Lightroom that I do like using more than the the gradient radial tool in Photoshop so I'm just going to save this image and then open it up into Lightroom and just do a couple more things to it before we're finished okay I've opened up the the image in Lightroom first of all there's a couple of distractions in here this area here and this area here now rather than try to darken them or clone them out I'm just going to crop them out because I actually prefer a slightly more four by five type aspect ratio would also like to crop a little bit off the bottom here so I'm just going to go into the crop tool here and bring that up just a tad there and bring this down to how's that look looks pretty good okay now what I'd like to do I'd like to darken the edges just a little bit more and there's a number of ways we can do that we can either use the effects and and put some beginning in there or a more accurate way and something that has a bit more has more options is to use the radial tool here which I think is what I'm going to use so I'm just going to zoom out here to 1/16 so we've got lots of real estate around there the edge of the image pick the radial tool and I'm just going to draw a circle around this area here like so and just feather it just a tad now I want to darken the trees around the edge so I'm just going to adjust the exposure now I don't want to darken it too too much so I'm darkening it overall but I'm trying to open up keep the shadows reasonably open but if that makes sense I want this area to be darker than this area here so that your eye is drawn into the brightest area of the image okay that looks pretty good now that's the nice thing about Lightroom if you don't like it you can just adjust it later on or or backtrack quite easily okay now I'm going to pick a new radial tool and more let's do the same thing I'm gonna bring this down I'm just gonna brighten up the the center portion here this section here but don't really want to brighten up this bit up here now let's blend it right up and then feather it okay and then just bring that the exposure down that looks pretty good okay now I'm going to use the same kind of technique as I did on the the other the the other photograph that I processed I'm going to use the D haze so I'm just adding a little bit of atmospheric kind of fog in there being exposure down just a little bit okay I think that I think that's just about it you could bring this down just a bit even more I'm trying to avoid brightening these areas too much because they are a little bit distracting okay and I think that's it yeah looks pretty good if you press the F key you can get a better look at the image with a black background all right now I hope you got something out of this generally speaking I I don't spend this amount of time on on every single image that I take like if I was going to work on this image without doing a video on it it would probably take me maybe 10 15 minutes occasionally I'll spend quite a long time on an image if I really think it's worth working on but most of the time you know five minutes on an image sometimes less it really depends on the light and and and how much work the photograph needs and what kind of mood I'm in so I hope you enjoyed this if you did enjoy it please be sure to give me a thumbs up and I just wanted to mention before I sign off here I do have prints available for sale I've gone over to a third the vendor that offers prints and what I've done is each of the videos that I've been taking I've been trying to upload the images from those videos onto my website quiet light photo adventures a bit of a mouthful I know and if you go into the galleries there you'll see a gallery for each of the videos and then you'll see a larger version of each of the images and there's a button right next to each of the images that says purchase print and that'll take you to another site where you can buy you know an 8-byte 12:4 I think it's like $20 or $30 something like that now if you are looking for a limited edition print that I print myself you can find those on my other website which is Adam Gibbs comm and I have hundreds of images on there even if you just want to see what kind of photographs I take and what I've been doing for the last 20 odd years go to that site and you'll see pretty much all of my images there's there's just hundreds of them up there anyway either way please check out my websites and look around to see what you can find the quiet light one I'm I'm still updating I'm still working on that one and actually the other website needs updating and of course all these things take time right all right enough of that thank you very much again and I'll see you next time all right bye-bye [Music] I'm afraid [Music]

Channel: Adam Gibbs

Views: 53,324

Keywords: Tutorial, photodshop tutorial, dodging and burning, using layers, landscape photography tips and techniques, landscape photography, landscape photography tips, landscape photography blog, nature photography tips and tricks, nature photograph, winter photography, image processing tutorials, lightroom tutorial, photoshop tutorial, using luminosity masks, orton effect, photo processing tutorial, photo processing photoshop, photo processing lightroom, lightroom classic

Id: WQdvsPeRvBA

Length: 42min 27sec (2547 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2018