You are Dodging and Burning all Wrong! TRY THIS!

today we're gonna be talking about dodging and burning in photoshop but not your traditional dodging and burning we're gonna be using a very special blend mode that you probably aren't using in your workflow and i'm gonna explain exactly why this is a better method for dodging and burning hey everybody blake rudes here with f64 academy and f64elite.com today i'm going to be talking about dodging and burning and this may end up being quite a lengthy tutorial as i'm going to go into some history i'm going to show some techniques so i'm going to chapter it out so if you look in the description look at the time stamps it'll tell you exactly what i'm going to be talking about and where and actually if you're looking at the play bar down there it'll even have these little like stopping points as to where the next topic is so if there's something that you're already familiar with please feel free to skip to the next one however i do also have some actions for you but i don't want you to skip to the end of this video because you have no idea how to use them unless you watch what i'm going to show you today so i've got a lot of stuff to cover let's jump in so traditionally in the past you've probably heard of dodging and burning as being a method for you to make certain areas brighter or certain areas darker in your photograph to push and pull the viewer's eye around the image phenomenal technique to do it one of the best techniques to do it goes way back to the dark room now the traditional method that you might be used to is something like this you add a new layer press shift f5 and you fill that layer with 50 gray then you change that blend mode to something like soft light and then you grab your dodge tool over here and with that dodge tool selected if you brush on it will brighten things up because that's what dodging does in the dark room you're actually dodging the print from getting light which would keep it more paper white that's why dodging makes it brighter burning alt or option while you're in the dodge tool if you press alt or option it automatically switches you over to burning if you press and hold the alt key and then you can just start brushing in areas that you want to burn or make darker okay so burning darker dodging brighter at the end of the day you'd uncheck this and be like wow that was a much better look here we've got more light on her face which is where we want to direct the viewer's eye to anyway and her hair is a little bit darker which brings out her facial features more mission accomplished right we've got to tell you the soft light blend mode because what it does is it makes sure 50 grade doesn't affect your image anything that gets lighter will make your image lighter and it gets darker will make your image darker but soft light is not a routine or traditional blend mode and that the math that's surrounded by it even if you look at the help x adobe site soft light is actually a questionable thing as to what it's actually doing we know it's a contrast boosting blend mode but how it boosts that contrast is questionable and sometimes people will email me and say blake when i'm using the soft light method for dodging and burning i notice there's a color shift in my image how do i stop that from happening well the key is going to be in the linear light blend mode so let's go over here and i'll explain the linear light blend mode what you see here is a basically color rainbow set to 50 percent gray on top here you're going to see varying gradations of black transitioning into white so if we change this to the soft light blend mode like you're traditionally used to you'll notice that the areas here are lighter where we would have white and darker where we have black but nothing is purely black or purely white because the soft light blend mode allows 50 gray to be knocked out and will increase your brightness and darkness but it will never let you go to pure black or pure white in that process it's also increasing all of the colors that are in there as well so let's do this i'm just going to double click this and call this soft light okay now i'm going to duplicate it press command or control j on this and i'm going to call this linear light just show you the difference here i turn off this soft light blend mode this is set to linear light now i'm going to bring this to linear light and you're going to see that the linear light blend mode goes from black to white and it gives you really good solid black but not getting pure black and really solid white but not getting pure white so what's happening here the linear light blend mode is actually a combination of linear burn and linear dodge imagine that the thing that actually creates the linear light blend mode is dodging and burning so essentially what happens with the linear light blend mode is you are dodging and burning at the exact same time what it yields in the process is a good transition from light to dark but it's not a very good blend mode as it stands at a hundred percent it's not necessarily controlled by opacity it actually takes a lot of its mathematical algorithm from the fill so we're going to just drop and reduce this fill and you're going to start to notice that we can darken and lighten the colors here without getting a color shift or color cast added to them let's just make this 30 fill okay so now i'm going to do this i'm going to press ctrl shift alt and e and that's going to make a stamp of this we'll just call this ll okay and then with this one i'm going to do the same thing ctrl shift alt e and we'll call this sl for soft light just so you can see these right so this is a soft light one you'll notice that as we go from white to black when we start to get into the black realm it's actually creating color contrast along with light or tonal contrast look at linear light it's actually more true to a dark tone without altering or shifting your color so the linear light blend mode when we start to get the practical application here you're going to be like whoa it's so much better because of the fact that it's targeting your tones and not necessarily your colors now it will have a slight color shift in the process because it's darkening and enriching those colors as you dodge and burn but it's not going to be as severe as what happens with the soft light blend mode now i'm going to go ahead and look at the soft light blend mode here notice here the intensity of this is at 100 opacity 100 fill in soft light we can't get any more and if we want to get more we have to press command control j to duplicate it and watch what happens as we do that we start to get more intensity in our colors but we don't actually get more light quality to those colors now there's a very big difference here with the linear light blend mode if we want more intensity of this we adjust the fill and guess what things get darker the color shifts obviously it's getting darker but it's not increasing the saturation of the colors it's increasing the luminance or brightness of those colors therefore the linear light blend mode boom is so much better than soft light we're gonna look at this in practical application here real quick before we continue this is kind of like the commercial break if you like this please press the subscribe button below and hit the little bell to get notified i do video tutorials like this all the time where i take photoshop something very convoluted and very difficult and make it very easy to learn and give you an actionable workflow that you can use right now today so if you're the type of person that likes that kind of content press the subscribe button below and you'll get notified when the next video comes out this was the soft light example that we had before so i'll turn the eyeball off on that i'm going to make a new layer here press shift f5 we're going to fill this with 50 gray press ok changes to the linear light blend mode and then drop that fill down to about 15 percent i did tell you i had actions for you right this is a lot of stuff for you to try and remember so i don't want you to have to remember it but i want you to wait still okay you still have to wait so with this set to 15 fill we can go into our dodge tool now and we can brush in on her face and dodge certain areas of her face and then maybe down to where this light strip is coming alt or option switch over to the burn tool on the fly right just press alt or option i'm on the burn tool now pressing and holding alt or option to burn over here burning this side maybe i'll you know give her a little bit of light on that arm right there a little bit of light over here a little bit more light in her hair here and then a little bit of light across the top here so now we'll look at our dodging and burning efforts here okay now if we want this to be more impactful or more powerful what we would have to do with the soft light one is we'd have to press command control j on this to duplicate it a couple times and look at how poor that starts to get right but if we are on our linear light one we don't have to duplicate anything we just increase this to get more intensity on our dodging and burning see that so we get the initial dodging and burning set up by brushing in what we want to dodge and and burning what we want to burn but then as we increase this fill this becomes the intensity control and we can also reduce it so starting out at 15 is a really good idea because it gives you a lot of room for growth would you want to start at 50 not necessarily because as it stands with the way that the dodge and burn tool is set as i have it here as to mid tones with exposure at 10 50 would be going way too fast with the dodging and burning efforts that's why i prefer it more down towards the 15 to 20 percent whatever that might look like for you now here's the cool part and here's where the method gets even better imagine using this in conjunction with things like blend if so here i'm going to increase this quite a bit and when i increase this i say ooh i really like what's going on with the lights and the mid-tones but i don't necessarily like what how harsh it's getting in those shadow areas well if i double click on this and i go into blend if i can then move this over and start protecting some of those darker dark areas even from the dodging and burning that i've done so now i'm dodging and burning right i've got the best of both worlds now i've got the dodging and burning and i've got a really quick mask if you want to call it that because dodging and burning becomes a masking technique to protect certain areas of your image so i'm protecting the darkest dark areas from receiving this dodging and burning meaning i'm favoring the dodging and burning on the highlight or giving it highlight priority to what i'm dodging and what i'm burning so i still get a little bit of that burn but it's not so strong and so powerful and so contrasty look at the before and after on this it's a beautiful beautiful method for dodging and burning now this isn't just for portrait work if you are a landscape photographer like myself it's great for dodging and burning landscapes and also if you're a cityscape photographer no matter what it is that you're doing dodging and burning is a way for you to sculpt with light now i did say i've got actions for you because there's no way you're going to remember all this so what i've done is i've created a series of actions called the linear light dodge and barn from f64 cam i got a really cool surprise in here for you too this quick dodge and burn is a really awesome method where all you got to do is press play and it's kind of an automated dodging and burning to get you set up for dodging those highlights burning those shadows and making a really wonderful effect now the cool part here is that i've even made blendiff already for you so if you want to go dark favorite on this and press play on this it's going to favor the darker areas of your dodging and burning efforts even with this quick dodge and burn if we go light favored it's going to favor the lighter areas of the dodging and burning efforts and slowly transition out into the darker dark areas let's say you want to say you know what i just want this to be mid-tone favored and not touch the darks or the lights that much here it's now just targeting those mid-tones or if you don't want it to have anything on the mid-tones press play and now it's not targeting the mid-tones it's only targeting the darks and the lights and then there's a reset tonal favor here so that you can get that back to the original setup here now this quick dodge and bird method is pretty cool once you press play on it it gives you a really good dodging and burning and again just like we saw with the portrait you can make it dark favored so it stays true to those dark tones or the light favored where it's going to taper off on those darker tones and just boost up those lights a little bit this is a really cool method for dodging and burning it's something i just kind of came up with on the fly to give you some more stuff here in these actions now if we pop over to this image and do that quick dodge and burn here looks pretty good we can make that maybe mid-tone favored and there we go we've got a really fast dodged and burned image now that is the quick dodge and burn i just showed you that for the ease of the tutorial here but if you press play on this dodge and burn linear light what it's going to do is it's going to make your dodge and burn layer set to linear light 15 fill and it's also going to automatically select your dodge tool so you're right now you can just go right in and start dodging and burning on your imagery here these are some really cool actions and here's the even cooler part if you're a my panel owner this panel you've created called my panel where you can create a panel from actions you can actually build your own quick dodging and burning panel you just push the buttons dark favorite light favorite however you want that to be it's set up very well for my panel after seeing how effective this linear light blend mode is at 15 fill you're never going to go back to the old soft light method i can guarantee it because i know i haven't if you want to get your hands on these actions go ahead and click on this link that you're going to see here popping up on this page it's also gonna be in the description below and if you're interested in my panel that will also be in the description below if you have any tips or tricks with dodging and burning or you like what you see here please feel free to leave it in the comments thank you very much for taking the time to watch this i sincerely appreciate it

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 58,310

Keywords: Blake Rudis, f64 academy, f.64, How To, Tutorial, Photoshop, Adobe, Linear Light Blend Mode, Linear Light Dodge and Burn, How to Dodge and Burn in Photoshop, Dodging and Burning with 50% Gray, Best Dodge and Burn Method, Best way to Dodge and Burn, What is Dodging and Burning, Dodge and burn actions, Dodge & Burn Actions, Best way to retouch, retouching portraits, how to retouch a portrait, skin retouching, how to dodge and burn

Id: 16rx27aR5t4

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020