How to Dodge and Burn in Photoshop [2023 Updated Skin Retouching Tutorial]

hey guys and welcome back to my YouTube channel in today's video I'm going to be doing a big refresh of my dodging and burning process for 2023 and basically my skin retouching process overall so in terms of the main aspects they are quite similar to what I was doing back in 2019 I think when I did my last dodging and burning video but today I'm going to go through just a couple of extra tips especially around dodging and burning that are going to focus on what I like to do these days because I feel like editing has slowly changed over the last number of years and what is required a lot of the time by clients these days is quite different there has been a bit of a shift so I want to go through a couple of those tips as well and I'm also going to be going a little bit more in depth with local and Global dodging and burning so we're going to go through those aspects today as well if you do want to learn more about dodging and burning and Beauty retouching overall I do have my own course Beauty retouching for beginners which is now available at any time of the year you have lifetime access to the content once purchased so you will be able to go back to the videos and the content at any time you like to really understand some of those aspects a little bit more I also have a retouching course with domestica that might be of interest to you so to see those courses that I do currently have available make sure you go down to the description box below and go to my education website which is listed all right guys so let's get straight into the dodging and burning video today and I hope you guys enjoy okay so to start off guys we are now in capture one and I currently have my image here I have just finished some color grading by just popping on a capture one style which is the same as a preset in Lightroom and I've just done my color grading overall so this is usually my process what I'll do is I'll color grade in Capture One or Lightroom sometimes first and then I'll bring my image into Photoshop to do any skin retouching or Dodge and burn so first off I'm going to right click the image here in capture one and select edit with Adobe Photoshop and we're going to edit it as a PSD so now that we've got the image into Photoshop I'm going to start by doing some minor skin cleanup so just removing some of the obvious kind of blemishes or bumps on the skin now overall my process is pretty much similar to how it was back in 2019 when I did my last Dodge and Burn video however I do want to stress in this video now that dodging and burning has become something over the years that is more and more minimalistic to me so I try to do as minimal work as possible now with Dodge and burn and skin retouching overall I think there's a really big shift that is happening and I think rightly so and I do think that we need to be really aware of how the skin is looking and whether it's looking natural or it's looking completely overdone which is what happens a lot of the time when Dodge and burn is used so the technique that I'm going to show you guys today is going to be a little bit more light-handed and you will notice that I'm not going into every pore I'm not retouching every single little pour in the skin and every little crevice or every little bit of texture I'm really trying to maintain the texture that we've got in the image and I want the skin to look natural and to look like skin so remember that less is more with this technique of Dodge and burn so let's jump into doing a little bit of quick cleanup just with some of the healing tools so we're going to just create a blank layer down the bottom here and then I'm going to rename this to Healing so we've created a blank layer here because we really want this process to be as non-destructive to the image as possible with all the tools that we're using today so we are first going to be using the spot healing brush tool now it really depends on the day sometimes I might use the healing brush tool as well I quite like using that and the Clone stamp tool but for now I'm just going to use the spot healing brush tool it's a really simple and easy quick way of removing any little spots or bumps on the skin or even stray hairs which we'll also do so just showing you my brush settings now I have the hardness at 100 I have pen pressure selected if you're using a graphics tablet this will come in handy it'll allow you to be a little bit more controlled with your adjustments I've got the size of the brush about to 100 pixels at the moment but it's really going to depend on your image and whether it's a closed stripe shot that you might be editing also remember to make sure that you have sample all layers selected here so this little checkbox needs to have the tick in it this is because we want this tool to sample from our background layer onto this new layer here so we're actually sampling from the background layer even though we've got a blank layer here that we're working on so otherwise if you don't have that ticked there's nothing that's going to be picked up on the blank layer it'll be blank pixels there's nothing there so just make sure that that is definitely ticked before you start I'm going to zoom in a little bit here but one of the main mistakes I think a lot of people make when it comes to skin retouching especially these days is that they zoom in way too far now if I'm zooming in really really far here to like the poor level uh it's really hard to get an overall look or an overall feel for the image and this becomes a problem because it allows you to kind of go a bit too far with your retouching without even noticing it until you kind of zoom out later on so I kind of like to keep a relative distance there's not too many occasions where you're going to need to be Skin retouching So Close Up I mean look if you're doing a billboard campaign there may be that need for that but honestly most of the time I like to kind of keep this kind of distance out from the skin and sort of have that good overview still okay so you can use J on your keyboard as well to get the quick key for the spot healing brush tool and hold shift if you want to kind of cycle through the healing tools but for now we're just going to stick with the spot healing brush tool and I'm just going to remove a couple of the little bumps that we're seeing just in the image here although there's not really too many bumps that we really will have to remove here so just any little hairs and things like that that you want to remove we'll just use this tool quickly to do that you'll probably notice overall that my skin retouching process is a lot quicker as I said before I do feel that these days it's not something that I put a focus on in my imagery and I just think I've come to realize that it's so unnecessary to spend four hours retouching skin I mean there has been instances in my career where clients have specifically asked for that but more and more these days there is a shift that is happening where clients don't want to see unrealistic skin they want to see pores they want to see texture they even want to see blemishes and pimples from time to time and that's completely okay I think there needs to be a level of realization that there has been a change with a lot of commercial Beauty photography and sometimes less is just more when it comes to retouching and I wholeheartedly agree with that so I'm just removing some of those little hairs here I'm just going to remove this fine line just here and just a few bumps down here okay so for now we're just going to leave it as that I'm going to turn this layer on and off and you can just see I've removed just a little bit of the texture there just a couple of the bumps and now we're going to create our Dodge and burn layers so for those of you who have never used Dodge and burn before Dodge and burn is the process of adding light and dark to an image to really create an even complexion or even skin tone or kind of even up those areas of the skin that might just need a little bit more softness or like I said a bit more evenness and I'm going to explain how it works exactly in just a second but first we're going to create our Dodge and burn layers so to create Dodge and burn layers we just go down to the adjustment layers button just down here and then we're going to go up to Curves so this is our first adjustment layer and you can see that our curves box has just appeared up the top here we're going to move this line right up so this is going to be our Dodge layer because it's brightening the image Dodge is adding light to the image so we're going to also make sure that this mask here this layer mask is selected and hold down control I on the keyboard or command I for a Mac to invert the mask so we want this little box to be black we're then going to rename this to dodge now we're going to do the exact same process again but we're going to do it for the burn layer so we're going to go down to our adjustment layers we're going to go up to Curves and this time we're going to bring the line down so it's getting darker so this will be our burn layer making sure again that our layer mask is selected we're going to hold down Ctrl I to invert the mask and we're going to rename this layer to burn so you can also add these layers into groups which I like to do quite often so I'm going to just create a little folder here and I'm gonna call this dodge and burn and I'm also going to create another folder here with the healing layer and I'm going to call this healing so I'm just going to move the healing layer into the healing group and the Dodge and burn layers into the Dodge and burn group so there's not really any right or wrong way to start off with Dodge and burn you can use Dodge first or you can start with burn first there's no particular area of the face that I like to start with when doing my skin retouching with Dodge and burn but I am going to zoom in just a little bit more so you can see what's kind of happening when I do apply these tools we do first need to set our brush settings though so we need to make sure that our paint brush tool is selected on the side here and we're going to make the size of the brush quite small so we about that size about 42 pixels for this image making sure that the hardness is also at zero percent then we're also going to ensure that our opacity for the brush is at 100 and the flow is at one percent this is going to really help with building up the dodging and burning in our image we want to have full control over how the brush work and everything is applied in the image if you're using a master Dodge and burn you might be best to have your opacity quite a bit lower um whether that be 20 or so as well as flow but it's going to really help to give you a little bit more control and build up your dodging and burning a bit more also make sure when you go over to brush settings over here that the transfer box is checked so going to the transfer section I also like to make sure that under opacity Jitter pen pressure is selected from the drop down menu where it says control here so as a final setting we also have to make sure that white is selected as the color the foreground color here now this is because we're working on the mask on the adjustment layer mask and we're actually going to be bringing those adjustments through with Dodge and burn that we've applied with the curves layer so it's currently invisible on the image but we're going to bring some of that back so starting off in our Dodge layer we're actually going to start lightening certain parts of the skin tone here so you can adjust your brush size as you go along and you're probably going to have to because there will be certain sections where you'll need a larger brush and some where you'll need a smaller brush so also to make a note here we are actually starting off with local dodging and burning now local dodging and burning is done and performed zoomed in to the image so we're really working with a smaller brush on some of these areas and then we're going to move on to doing Global dodging and burning a little bit later on where we'll use allow larger brush and it's kind of more to bring it all together will be a lot more zoomed out on the image as well so just zooming in a little bit more and selecting our brush we're going to start running the brush over these areas here you can see that there's a little bit of Darkness here where the highlight is quite obvious but then there's these little little gaps here that just happen to be a little bit darker so what we're essentially doing is filling it in with the light to make it appear just that little bit more even so I'm not going to be too specific about this I'm just kind of doing this quite roughly as is my technique these days it is really not super super detailed with Dodge and burn I just kind of do it until it looks and starts to look a little bit more even when I first started off with using Dodge and burn I probably would have been zoomed in a lot closer and I'd be doing every little pour and I just think these days that is probably a little bit more unnecessary to do that because we really want to keep that texture on the skin tone so you can see that I'm just running the Dodge brush just over some of those areas where it's a little bit darker and it kind of looks like little gaps where the Highlight is on the skin so I'm going to continue to fill in some of these little spots and then we'll move on to using the burn tool as well thank you so you can also change the brush size to be a little bit bigger and just kind of if you want to lighten the under eye area just a bit you can do that and I'm going to zoom out now just to show you what that has actually done to the image so before we go too far with it we're just going to take a breather zoom out and see what we've done so far so I'm going to just turn that on and off and you can see that that's really made those areas a little bit more even overall you can see it's just kind of filled that in so now I'm also going to move on to using the burn layer so we're going to select that and the mask and it's really important that you do use a really good equal amount of Dodge and burn in your image if you constantly use just dodge to your image it's really going to lighten the skin tone overall now this is especially true when it comes to working with deeper skin tones you really want to be using a good combination of Dodge and burn but you'll be using the burn tool more often I would say with lighter skin tones you'll probably use the Dodge tool more often we are going to use Dodge a little bit more today but if I was working on a deeper skin tone I would be using primarily burn for the most part so now with burn I'm going to zoom in a bit more again we're going to get our brush tool back and we're just going to slightly blend some of these areas so I don't want the whole cheek to be highlighted because that's not how the original image was we want to make sure that we've still got that contrast and the Skin's not looking too flat and too even overall so I'm actually just going to work at Burning just some of these areas on the side here and just like blending some of those little patchy areas just there with the the highlight just to kind of blend it a little bit more if you feel that some of the Highlight is too strong in areas you can also use the burn tool just to run over those those parts as well which is just what I'm doing just slightly to make it a bit easier to blend there thank you so most of the time the the best rule to work to dodge and burn is using Dodge on the lighter areas and then burn on the darker areas and some of the mid-tones as well it doesn't always work like that but for a lot of the time in the shadows and when you're working in these kinds of areas you'll be using the burn tool and then when you're working in the lighter highlighted areas you'll be using the Dodge okay so I'm going to start to zoom out a little bit more here and I'm just going to turn that layer on and off and you can see that's just kind of Blended some of these sections just a little bit more and we're not kind of making it too light here we're not going to drag the Dodge down too far although I do think we need just a little bit more dodging in this section here so I'm just going to go back to the Dodge layer do a little bit there there okay so zooming out again I'm just going to take a snapshot now and show you guys the original so this is the before and now this is the after so you can see that it's really just created that little bit more evenness and really for that cheekbone right now that is pretty much all I do until we get to any Global dodging and burning where we might do a bit of contouring just around the sides there but this is basically how I would proceed with the rest of the image and I'm going to continue on now with dodging and burning the rest of the image and then I'll speed it up just a little bit so you guys don't have to sit here for another 15 minutes or so and then we'll move on to our Global dodging and burning foreign on the skin tone locally we're actually going to move on to doing some Global dodging and burning I've continued on with our local just around the other sections of the face we're going to start to look at the image now and see where there's some little patches just here where I can see that I've dodged and burned locally but because I've been zoomed in I couldn't really see the overall shot so we do need to blend those sections just a little bit more so I'm going to first go to burn here and working on some of the mid-tones up here on the forehead I'm just going to move the bone tool into just some of those lighter sections there that just look a little bit patchy we're just really gently blending them back in to the skin tone so that's looking pretty good and I'm going to do the same thing just over here so you'll have to adjust your brush size most of the time Global dodging and burning is done with a larger brush size so probably around like this size and you can kind of just do a bit of contouring but you can also use a smaller brush size just to kind of blend in any sections that do look a little bit Patchy from the local dodging and burning thank you okay so just to give you a quick progress snapshot I'm going to just do a before and after so far so that's looking quite good to me and as kind of like a Finishing Touch these days for my Dodge and burn work I usually like to just add a really softening effect just on some of the skin texture if it does still look a little bit rough because I don't really go into every uh crevice like I said and every little bump now and retouch it out with Dodge and burn so usually as a kind of a Finishing Touch or just to kind of add to the skin retouching process and as I've mentioned I don't really use Dodge and burn for a huge portion of that anymore it's really been stripped a bit more down to Basics with it so we're actually going to create a new layer up here and we're going to name it clone stamp but I am going to move that just above the Dodge and burn layer and I'm going to create its own folder and we're just going to call it texture so we'll just move that clone stamp layer in there and now I'm going to go over to the Clone stamp tool so just over on the side here we're going to make sure that the hardness is zero percent and that the size is quite large so about 500 pixels for this image and making sure that our opacity and flow is at around the 20 Mark for both of them this is going to be a really soft effect that we're just going to gently apply to the image and we need to make sure that our brush settings once again will just make sure that transfer is selected and with pen pressure as well for the opacity Jitter so to use the Clone stamp tool we're going to hold down alt on the keyboard or option for mac and we're going to start selecting areas of the skin and then gently running the brush over those more textured areas just to get a little bit more smoothness so I'm just going to start here and Sample and then just very gently run the brush continuously over that area and same down here as well so I'm just gonna very gently blend some of those areas in just a bit more with the Clone stamp tool but it's really important not to go too overboard with this tool it's really easy to do so so we're just going to make sure that we are being pretty light-handed with it and even if you just want to soften some of the facial hairs it's usually a technique that I use to do that as well but I really don't get rid of all the facial hairs these days I just don't see any real point to doing that it sort of adds that natural effect to the skin tone which we want so I don't really see the point in removing some of those okay so zooming out I'm just going to do this technique a little bit more just on the shoulders here okay so now as a final before and after I'm going to go back to the original image so this is the original and now this is the after so realistically we haven't removed every little bum we haven't removed every little pour I'd probably go back in just really carefully removing some of the makeup Fallout as well so you can always go back to Healing layer for this and grabbing the healing spot healing brush tool you can just kind of go back in and clean up any makeup Fallout that might have happened or any extra little bits of texture that you don't really want but usually by this point the techniques that I've used have pretty much cleaned up anything in particular that I need to to remove and I'm thinking overall that's looking pretty good I probably wouldn't go much further with that at all so overall I'm pretty happy with that and that is basically my dodging and burning technique so just a quick before and after again so before and after and realistically this is how I retouch these days um I really don't spend hours and hours and hours on each image I will sometimes get the requests from clients to have a certain level of retouching on images but for me I like to keep a very natural effect and it's really only the temporary imperfections that you kind of tend to remove now thank you guys so much for watching this video today if you liked it please give it a thumbs up and if you haven't subscribed to my channel already make sure that you do because I'll be posting lots more content in future if you want to learn more about beauty retouching and general post processing techniques as I said I do have some courses available over on my education website that you can click through to and if you do have any more requests for my YouTube Channel please put them in the comments section below as I'd love to hear them thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: Kayleigh June

Views: 40,864

Keywords: skin retouching photoshop tutorial, skin retouching, skin retouching photoshop, how to retouch skin in photoshop, dodge and burn photoshop, dodge and burn skin retouching, dodge and burn, how to dodge and burn skin in photoshop, how to dodge and burn in photoshop, dodge and burn photoshop 2023, skin retouching photoshop 2023, skin retouching photoshop tutorial 2023, how to retouch skin, how to edit skin in photoshop, dodge and burn tutorial, dodging and burning, skin retouch

Id: prv_lrrZRr4

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 02 2023