Wicked Good Blend If Dodge and Burn Tip

hello Blake grutas here with f/64 Academy and f/64 elite and today I'm going to show you this really awesome trick using blend if and dodging and burning so that your efforts are seamless and beautiful in transition we're gonna go from an image that looks like this to an image that looks like this and show you what this horrible looking magenta overlay thing is doing here on our photograph let's go ahead and jump into Photoshop I've got a lot of awesome stuff to teach you and I hope you're prepared to take notes [Music] so what I want to show you today is my favorite dodging and burning method in Photoshop but also a blend if tip that can be used with it that is gonna make a beautiful seamless transition so that while you're dodging and burning you're not just leaving these giant splotches of white or black on your photograph this technique is awesome it's something that I taught in the advanced dodging and burning course that I've recently just come out with that comes with an awesome panel just a little shameless plug there and before we begin if you haven't done so already go ahead and subscribe to this channel because I do a lot of really cool tutorials just like this so here's a photograph of my son this is Michael he was playing hooky from school one day and I said you know what if you're gonna be playing hooky you're gonna come down and work with me because I had some new flashes that I wanted to test out for my Sony cameras and some soft boxes and I just wanted to test him out and see what they can do so I just did a basic set up behind me just give him a book and give him one of my old Polaroid cameras and said ok I want you to act like you're reading this and he did a great job but when I look at this image you know as far as the lighting is concerned I like the lighting that I did here and I like the result that we have but I want to draw the eye into the image more and we do that with dodging and burning so I'm gonna do is I'm going to add a curves adjustment layer here two of them actually two curves adjustment layers let's just double click this top one and we will call this Dodge okay so essentially what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna segregate our dodging onto one curve and our burning onto another one we double click this one we call this the burn curve now in the course that I teach here on the advanced concepts in f/64 elite there's a panel here this is method number two on the panel and it already is set up for you so we're gonna do with this burn curve is we're gonna go ahead and drop this burn curve down and we drop it down to a point where we just want this image to get a little bit darker now if we go too far that's how dark this is gonna be as we start to resurrect the the effect so we want to go to a point where we kind of like it like right about there where it's dark but it's not like insanely dark we're in essentially we're controlling how far our burning efforts can go with this curve so when I put it down to about here that's as far as these burning efforts are going to go and I think that's good now all we need to do is click on that mass press command or control I ok dodge curve again we're controlling the Dodge or how bright the image is going to get and we're gonna go ahead and bring up that curve to make this image brighter to about there it's already got a lot of bright characteristics to it so I really am paying attention to this book here and my son's face and even some of the lighting in the background here as I pulled this up to make it brighter and that's about where I leave it I click on the mask and I press command or control I so now you're like well wait a second Blake those curves that you just did have no effect that's true because what we did is we allowed the effect to come through by pulling down that curve or pulling up the curve but then we switched the mask over from white to black so it basically has no effect so now we need to make it have an effect so impress B for my brush tool I think a rather large brush here on my burn and I'm gonna use the pen that I have here I either use an X P pen star G 640 which is a really cheap pen and tablet if you're interested in that kind of thing or I use a Wacom tablet either way I really like this start XP pen 1 because it's so it's so cheap and it does a great job so I'm gonna go ahead and just darken this area down a little bit here just by brushing see I'm brushing with white so you're like wait wait why is that making the image darker if you're brushing with white well as we discussed this before on this mask we're basically using white to bring back the areas that we want from that darkness of that curve so I'm gonna I'm gonna make my brush a little bit smaller I'm gonna come down here I'm gonna really darken this area down here because I want to create some depth here at the bottom of the image that's gonna draw our high into the photograph and what am i dodging and burning I'm just making things darker that I want to be darker in this case I might come in here and just paint this a little bit in his hair maybe maybe even just a little bit on his face a little bit here maybe a little bit in the wrinkles of his clothing but just things that I really wanted to darken down and basically push the viewers eye away from so then if I switch over to them I'll go ahead and brush with white I've already got my brush all set up so all I gotta do is brush with white and I can bring out the book that he's reading here to draw your attention there I might even make this a little bit bigger and bring out the camera down here and then even this lighting in the background here I really like how that looks and then coming here through his hair smaller brush and just kind of paint in the areas that I want his hair to have those highlights on and then I'll hit his foot here his little foot and this bag that he has over here so this dodge curve essentially is brightening up the areas where I want your eye to be navigated to in the image if we look at our efforts we can press alt or option on the background layer here is the before here's the after I'm essentially going from a rather flat image where all of the lighting is pretty even and I'm forcing you into the focal point of the image by making that brighter and then making the things around it darker that I want to push and pull and navigate the eye through the really great thing about having your dodge and burn curves on separate layers like this is that you can just come in here and say you know what I want them to be a little bit brighter and you can make it brighter that's what makes it brighter the mask controls what we painted on here but the curve controls how bright it gets so what's that cool blend if trick well check this out blend if is a really awesome trick that we can do here where we can make a nice natural transition because when I dodge and when I burn I want things to get brighter and I want things to get darker and I do want my darker areas to get brighter and I do want my brighter areas to get darker okay because that's the whole point of dodging and burning but if we look at these masks they're very just hard like spots right so we need this to be a more seamless transition so what I'm gonna do here in order to make you visualize this I'm gonna double click on this and I'm gonna change this to color overlay now in this layer style I have this set to color overlay I have my color overlay set to a hundred percent opacity with a magenta color and that's very important because magenta is not a color that we typically see in the environment or in our images so it's great to use as a color overlay what this color overlay is doing is this given me an alternate view of the mask and what I've effected on my image but it can also help me with my blend if efforts so I'm just gonna go ahead and turn this off so you can see that I'm gonna go over to my blending options up here and I'm in the Dodge so I want to make my darker areas of my image have less of an effect so typically what I would do is I'd say okay any of the darker areas in the underlying layer I want you to be protected from my Dodge if I do that I'll bring this up and you'll start to see that those darker areas are getting protected from the Dodge but they've got this kind of messy messy pixelated quality to them so if I press alt or option that will fade them so that's a great tip but I can't really see what's happening so let me go back down here and turn this color overlay out I'll come back up to those blending options and watch now look at that now we can exactly see exactly where that is taking effects this is basically our dodge area so this is the things that we're making brighter so we do basically want some of those darker areas to be getting brighter because that's the whole point of dodging and burning we just want it to be very blended and natural in its approach the more we move this over the more that gets protected and that looks about good right about there I'll go ahead and press ok and turn that color overlay off and look at that now a very beautiful seamless transition for those dodging effects I'll double click on the burn on that burn what do I want you to do I want you to go to the color overlay I want you to go up to blending options and then over here we're gonna protect our highest highlight areas now I'm not gonna bring this over to about here and then just leave it I'll press alt or option and allow it to split and feather on over so there's a nice seamless transition here now with this there's not a whole lot of white in this image in these areas that's why we might not see that much protection this is basically image specific but check this out if we make a new layer above this and in this new layer we use the gradient and I'm just gonna go from black to white and do a black to white gradient here let's go ahead and invert that - i pressing ctrl I okay that's exactly what I want so now if we look at our burn and we look at the effects that we've done here in this burn if we go to the layer Styles of that here we can actually visually see what happens when we protect our whitest white areas from this burn as we move this over those whitest white areas are being protected you can see that as we go through here with that gradient in the background all the way down to our darkest darks well because we're burnin we do want to bring that over I showed you this on a gradient so you can see how certain areas are going to be blended look at that this is basically saying hey you're whitest white areas are gonna be mostly protected and we'll just blend this in feather this over for those middle white areas there all the way into let's say our mid-tones at 1:20 and that effect there is a very slow transition from your whites into your mid-tones as we bring this slider over it's going to protect those areas and give it a very small sliver of area or it's gonna be affecting on that mid-tone area so that's good about about right there if we were to go ahead and turn the color overlay off on that one but turn the color overlay on on this dodge you can see if we double-click on that and we go to our blending options and we move this over those areas that get protected in those darkest dark areas from that Dodge on this gradient now that's about right right about there I think that's about where we had it that's good I just wanted to show you that on that gradient so you can see what's happening here so the cool thing about this that you can turn these overlays on and off whenever you want and see exactly where you're dodging and burning effects are taking place but better yet it just makes your image look so much better when you put your hand to it and you tell the image what you want to be darker what you want to be brighter and you sculpt that image with white it's such a phenomenal thing to do and it's something I wouldn't skip every photo that I edit goes through some form of dodging and burning to brighten and darken areas down so that I can be the one that dictates where your eye goes and not the light that was recorded at that given time as I mentioned before these tips are coming from an advanced concepts and dodging and burning course that I've created for f/64 elite members it comes equipped with a panel that has all of this already in there for you it's got a view mask on button a view mask off button it's got your dodge and burn curves right here and it even has all of your protection measures right here in that panel I show you that I show you that because it's an awesome workflow tool that comes right there with that course if you're interested in more information in this course in that panel I'll post a link in the description below and also in the card above in the video here again my name is Blake Rudess I hope you enjoyed this tutorial it's a phenomenal way to protect that dodging and burning area to make a nice seamless transition in your dodging and burning efforts so it doesn't just look like splotchy hot spots and dark spots while you're dodging and burning if you liked this tutorial please comment on it share it and subscribe if you haven't done so already I create tutorials like this all the time and hit that little bell in the subscription notification there so that every time I create a new tutorial you get notified thank you very much for taking a look at this I send really appreciated [Music]

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 23,103

Keywords: Blake Rudis, f64 academy, f.64, How To, Tutorial, Photoshop, Adobe, Dodge and Burn, Blend If, Clean Dodge and Burn, Advanced Photoshop, Layer Styles, Color Overlay, Color Overlay Dodge and Burn, Photoshop Tutorial, how to dodge and burn, dodge and burn photoshop, photoshop tutorial, dodging and burning, dodge and burn photoshop tutorial, photo effects, photo editing, portrait dodging and burning, aaron nace, photography tutorial, non-destructive dodge and burn

Id: sXmUIOeRvAM

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 24 2019