Right now, I'm going to show you how to do
dodging and burning using the new adjustment tool in Photoshop. I asked you guys if
you wanted a more in-depth tutorial. A lot of you said yes. So here we go. Currently,
this is only available in the beta version of Photoshop. So I'll give you a link if you don't
know how to install the beta. So let's grab the adjustment brush. So if we go down under
the brushes, you'll see that it's nested there. And we're going to grab the adjustment
brush and we're going to start with brightness and contrast. Now, I'm just going to tap
to activate it. Now, when I activate it, what you'll see is an adjustment layer with a
layer mask. And yes, this does work the same as brushes and adjustment layers with masks, but
it's just quicker and simpler to use. So just to show you how some of the settings work, we're
going to take the brightness and we're going to turn it all the way up. You'll see that in
the properties panel, and that it corresponds with the adjustments here in the layers panel.
Okay, so what we need is some brush settings. So we're going to select the brushes, and I'm
going to be using the soft round brush. Now, if you're using something like a Wacom tablet,
Sense Labs, Microsoft surface, something that has a pressure sensitive pen, you have the ability
to change some things based on how hard you press. Let me show you how to set that up as well. Now,
you'll see two settings here. If I click, this will change it for size. So if I'm pressing hard,
I'll get a thicker stroke. If I press a lighter, I'll get a thinner stroke. And this enables
me to create different types of effects. Now, if the other one is turned on, this is capacity.
So that means if I'm pressing hard, we're going to get a lot of adjustment. If I press it lighter,
we get less. And this enables us to do things like blend things in. And this is very nice for dodging
and burning. In fact, if you get a pressure sensitive tablet, I would get it just for this
purpose to be able to blend when you're doing your dodging and burning. Don't worry if you're using
a mouse, this tutorial will still apply to you. All right, but let's have a look at how we can
have more settings than just using these two buttons up here, although this will get you most
of the way there. If we go under window and then we turn brush settings on, this will bring up the
adjustments here. And under the brush settings, we have the ability to set opacity based
on pin pressure. Notice that transfer shows pin pressure set to capacity. Notice what
happens if I turn it off. See how it turns it off in the panel? And if I turn on size,
it will appear under shape dynamics. So this is just a shortcut to access these settings,
but when you go into the settings themselves, you've got more control. So we can choose shape
dynamics and we can choose pin pressure. But now when we're in here, we have the ability
to say, hey, we want a minimum diameter, meaning don't go any thinner than this.
Same thing when we go under the transfer, we have the ability to set a minimum amount
of opacity as well as lots of other settings in here. Now, a couple of key things. You
can use size and opacity at the same time. So if I do, that means if I press light, I get a
thin stroke in its light. And as I press harder, it gets thicker and more solid. This might have
its purposes, I find it very difficult to work with both of those turned on at the same
time. So most of the time I'm going to be using transfer. Now, if you change brushes, these
settings can change. If you hit that little lock, that will lock them in so it doesn't matter
what brush you use, transfer will be locked on all the time. And if you're getting any value
out of this video, hit that subscribe button, turn on notifications, you won't miss any of
my videos. But for the sake of this tutorial, let's use the setting up here. Now, there's
another setting that's really important, and that's the flow. Now, I've done
another video on flow versus opacity, and I've determined that for dodging and burning,
flow works the best. So what we're going to do is we're going to drop this down to about
10%. I can drag or I can do it faster using the keyboard shortcuts. If you hold down the
shift key and tap one, that'll give you 10%. You can do an increments of 10 by tapping six for
60%, 0 will give you 100%, or if you want to do a smaller amount, just quickly tap 08, and that'll
give you 8 %. Remember, hold down the shift key. We'll adjust the flow. Otherwise, we're adjusting
the opacity. And usually for flow, I find if you really want to be able to paint subtly, you want
something around about an eight or even a seven to 10 %. And notice what happens as I'm brightening
this area. Now I can just slowly build this up. And in a much more realistic fashion. Let's look
at the strategy for dodging and burning now, and then I'll show you some great tips at the end
of that. So what we're going to do is we're just going to start again, and we're going to do two
adjustments. We're going to do lighten and darken. Now, under the adjustments, we have the ability to
use exposure or brightness contrast. I feel like brightness contrast works the best, but I'll also
show you a way to test it on the exposure. Okay, so what we want to do is look at this image
and think about where is the light coming? The light's coming from over here on the left,
which is where the sun is. So all the areas that are facing that light should receive light and get
brightened. The areas such as here that are shaded from that light or facing the opposite direction
should get shadow. And by blending in that light and shadow, we can add a lot of depth to this
image. Okay, so with the brightness and contrast, we're going to start with the light first.
So I'm just going to tap on an area I know is going to be brightened. And once again, this
is just going to open up our adjustment layer. I'm going to turn the brightness all the way
up so we can easily see what's happening. Now, don't worry if you overdo it because we can
adjust the pass it later. All right, so now I'm going to go with the brush. Now, there's
another keyboard shortcut is if I hold down the Control option key on Mac and I drag side to
side, I can change the size of the brush or I can go up and down to change the hardness. If you're
working on Windows, that's the Alt, right drag. So that's a useful thing to know. The other
way you can do it is with the bracket key. Left bracket key makes it smaller, right bracket
key makes it bigger. All right, so let's go ahead and start to paint some lighter areas in
here. Now, I'm starting at that low opacity, but see how when we go into that grass, see how
now it just starts to come alive. And these are the areas that are going to be receiving the light
because they're facing towards the sun. And here I'm going to use a bigger brush just to get some
of the areas like the water. I'm not going to do all the water. I'm going to be pretty strategic
with that. I definitely want to get that brighter part here to lighten that up in a little bit
in the sky. Now, I'm using a big brush. Now, here's the thing. If you use a larger brush,
you'll start to get more of a painter effect. If you use a smaller brush, you can get a
more chiseled look. Okay, so that's the big areas I'm just hitting here. Now I'm going to
go really small and start to do some details. So All right, if we look at what we've done,
here we are before and after we've added some light. Now, if it's too much, we can adjust
the opacity. All right, what we want to do now is we want to create a shadow layer. So let
me just select the background. And the reason I'm doing that is because I'm going to use the
same adjustment. And all I need to do is just tap now and that will create a second instance
of this. Now, we're going to take the brightest, we're going to turn it all the way down.
Because we want to darken. Now, remember, we make some adjustments at the end where we'll
do some fine-tuning. All right, so first thing I want to do is a larger shadow area. So I'm
going to use a larger brush, and I'm just going to gently paint in some of these areas, I want to
add a little shadow. And now I'm going to use a smaller brush and go in and do the fine details.
Okay, let's have a look and see what we've done. Here's the highlight areas, and here's the shadow
areas. If I turn them on, you can see them. If I turn them off, you can see. And notice in
these areas around here. I'm going to take the opacity all the way up on both of these, and
now I can adjust them using the brightness and contrast. So for the shadows, we can adjust how
much shadow we want, and we can also adjust the amount of contrast. I'm going to have a pretty
high contrast for the shadow. Let's grab the highlights. Let's bring the contrast down a
little bit on the highlights. And then adjust the brightness for where we want. The reason I'm
doing it is just to make it so we're not losing the color here in the water. And if we look at
this, here we are before and after. So here's the I don't have to paint everything again. Let
me show you. So say I wanted to do an exposure for the highlights. I'm going to hit an exposure.
Just tap. That'll create an exposure layer. So here's a highlight area. I'm just going to turn it
off. And if I grab the mask from the highlight and I hold down the Alt or the Option key and I drag
that, I can replace the mask inside the exposure. And if we And if we like the adjustment maybe on
the land, but we don't like it over the water, we can simply choose to paint black inside
the mask over the water. And we can change the foreground to the background, or we can just
hit the minus key up there, and that will select black. Let's grab a large brush here, and now
we can just start to paint away that adjustment, still using that pen pressure on the flow until
we get to the amount that we like. So we're just reducing it but not completely eliminating
it. And that gives us a different an effect. So let's look at another quick tip I want to show
you guys here, and that's when we're dealing with straight lines. So say we're going to paint for
an exposure setting. Let me hit the left bracket key to make this brush smaller. And we're going
to apply some highlights to the left side of these columns. So I could try to paint on here,
and not too bad. But here's an easier way to do it. Once I start to paint, hold down the shift
key, and that will constrain it into that line. And therefore, I don't have to worry about trying
to have a steady hand. I just follow that edge there, and it will keep a straight line there.
Very, very easy to do. Let's just do these top ones quickly. And then the same thing when I want
to do the shadows. Select here Here, grab another exposure adjustment by simply tapping. This time
we're going to take it down. We're going to take the exposure down low. And let's start on the
shadow side. Hold the shift key, constrain us, and I can just paint that shadow and look at that.
Start to paint it, hold down that shift key, we get that constraint. I'm using that pin pressure
and just using a small amount of pressure. I'm going to show you one more tip once I've done
this area here. So I'm just trying to paint that in a little bit. Okay, so sometimes to add some
shadow, now I can go for a larger brush and paint even softer or even turn that flow down lower. And
if you're using a mouse, keep that flow down quite low. And you can just start to build up some of
these shadows in these areas of that bigger brush. And it just blends things together, adds
a little bit of a shadow effect in there. And we can just build that up over time.
All right, so if we look at these pillars, what we've done before and after, there we
are before, and there we are after. I hope you found this tutorial useful. Drop a comment
underneath and let me know if you did. By the way, I have other tutorials on dodging and burning
using the standard way with brushes. Check out that tutorial right there. If you're new to the
cafe, welcome. Hit the subscribe button, turn on notifications. You won't miss any of my tutorials.
Until next time, I'll see you at the cafe.
