Hi, I'm Chelsea and today I'm going to show you how to use dodging and burning
to bring out more beautiful light and coloring in your portraits. I'm also
going to show you just some general editing in Lightroom. So we'll be using
this picture and I'll provide a file in the description so you can follow along.
And this is the before and this is the after, you can see I just warmed up the
photo a bit and used dodging and burning to make the light on her face more
flattering and a bit more dramatic. Let's go into develop here and the first
thing I'm going to do is just adjust the crop a little bit.
And next I'm going to
lower the exposure so that it's just a little bit too dark. Her skin is just a bit
under exposed because i'm going to go in and i'm going to use the adjustment
brush here and brush in some highlights and shadows and do some dodging and
burning. So let's get started with that.
So the first adjustment brush I'm going to use is going to be to just clean up
her skin just a little bit.
I'm going to soften skin and press o to see your mask. And she has nice skin so I
don't want to go too far. In fact one of my pet peeves is when people soften the
skin too much because it looks really artificial and cheesy. I always end up
going a little bit too far anyway so at the end of all of my editing, I like to go
back and dial everything to the more natural side by about 20 percent. Ok, so i
will press o to get rid of that mask. And to me it looks a bit too soft, so i'll
take the clarity slider here and go to about -43 and the sharpness down
to about 8.
I like to do the before-and-after just to see, make sure it doesn't look
too unnatural. I used a high ISO in the shot too because it was pretty dark
outside, so there's a lot of grain and that can make the skin look like it has
a lot of texture to it. So now that that's smoothed a bit, i'll use the heal tool and just get
rid of a few of these blemishes.
I'll press the adjustment brush again because now we're going to start the dodging and
burning. So good here to this little effects menu and go to dodge. And we're going
to dodge her entire face first. Press O o that you can see your mask.
And I'll get a bit of her neck.
And sometimes the mask, i find that it doesn't really show you completely where
you're working. I mean, sometimes it can be patchy and you can't really tell from the
red mask. So I like to turn the exposure all the way up and make sure that it's
pretty evenly selected everything. Then turn it down to what I want.
I'll create a new layer for the adjustment brush or a new adjustment brush
and select burn. And i'll press O so that I can see my mask again. You can see I have
my flow down so that it's not too harsh. When dodging and burning, something
that's really important is to make sure that the transitions aren't really hard.
Because unless there's very hard light, you're not going to have hard
transitions between the shadows and light anyway. In this environment i'm going for
a soft light look so I want it to be a very gradual transition between the
shadows and highlights. The ladies will know this, but when you're dodging and
burning you want to follow the same guidelines as if you were contouring when
you're using makeup. So under the cheekbones, they call it burning in the
hairline even when you're doing makeup and along the sides of your subject's
nose will narrow the nose a bit. And at the jawline, a lot of people don't have a
lot of definition between the jawline and their neck so you can use some
shadows to bring that out.
It can also create a slimming effect if you use it in certain areas, like under
the jaw line and I'm using it here just because i want the light to be a bit
more dramatic. So I'm kind of darkening up the natural shadows in the
picture. You can be a little bit messy because i'm going to go back and use the erase tool.
We'll use the erase tool and we'll lower the flow and make this bigger. We don't
want it in her hair.
And you can just see I'm just softening all the edges that there aren't any harsh
transitions between the shadows and highlights. And then some places you want
to put the flow completely up because you might not want it in your subject's hair
or in their eyes.
Ok, let's get rid of the mask and sometimes it helps to zoom out a bit so
you can see the full picture and then you can see how much exposure is too much.
So I'm just showing you that you don't want too much, it looks scary.
I'm going very subtle especially because i'm working on a child's portrait. It'd be
really creepy if I overdid it.
I don't like that pageant look. Okay, i'll create a new mask and then go to dodge
again. I just kind of generally dodged her face before and lightened it, now we're
going to go in and create highlights. And once again, those of you that wear makeup
will know where to put highlights. So here above the brows a bit, right down
the bridge of the nose and then you want a triangle under the eyes
and the cheekbones. And then sometimes you want to define the jawline as well.
That can be really nice for men.
If you're doing subtle edits and you want to bring out the definition of the
jawline it can be a nice masculine edit. I'll bring out some of the highlights here.
Some of these transitions are a bit rough so I'm going to turn down the flow
and just blend it a bit.
Then I'll take my erase tool and the flow is up pretty high, so i'm going to go over that
because i want to just blend again.
People have asked me before if I have
tips for fast edits and I don't because when you're doing- especially edits like
these, you really just have to put a lot of time in and it takes quite a bit of
patience to make sure that it looks natural.
I'm sure you've all seen ovver-edited portraits, they they just look really
artificial and they're- you think about the edit when you look at the picture more
than the picture itself and that's when you know the person is gone too far..
Just press Y here and see a before and after and that's very subtle. I'll go to my
adjustment layer again and this time i'm going to use the iris enhance.
I know it's iris enhance, but sometimes i do the whole eye. You can always erase if it doesn't
look good.
I'll bring up the sharpness just a little bit and then i'll create a new layer and
I'm going to go in and edit the eyes just a bit more.
And that is too much. You can see I zoom out and it looks a bit artificial.
So I'll reselect where I just was and just lower the exposure a bit.
I'm going to select new and then go to burn again and this time i'll be using the burn tool to
bring out her eyelashes. And sometimes you can even use it just to create a
dark ring around the outside of the iris which makes the eye stand out just a
little bit more. You can see how the eyes are just glowing a bit, the colors are
a little bit brighter,
they look more lit up. And i'm just zooming back to make sure that they don't look
scary like cat eyes. And I think that the white looks just a tiny bit too bright,
so what I do is, let me press Y again to get rid of that, I'll go back into this layer and then
just erase some of the mask. It shows you there, gonna reduce the flow.
That's better.
The next thing I'm going to do is use dodging and burning on her hair.
And much like what i did on her face, i'm doing an all-over mask on her hair and
then I'll go back and all just kind of add some highlights into the
naturally highlighted areas of her hair. And it's kind of what you're doing on
the skin too, you're just looking for the natural highlights and that will ensure
that your edit is natural looking. Okay, so let me take this mask off and that's not
too much. So I'll press new and do another dodge layer. Oh, actually, you know what, I
want to go back to that one because not only do I want to brighten it up a bit
I'd like to change color. So you can see if you slide your temperature slider, you
can warm up the hair and I'm just doing it a little bit and her hair is naturally, has
red in it, so I'm just pushing it towards the magenta side. Now I'll select new and
we'll go in and press O again. I use my left bracket tool to make my brush
smaller, but you could use the little scroll wheel on your mouse i think. I like my wacom
tablet here. A lot of people ask what this is, it's the Wacom. Wacom Intuous.
I like it, Tony doesn't.
Right for some people, not for others. Ok, so let me follow the natural highlights in her
hair. Make my brush flow a little bit heavier, it's feathered.
You can see these highlights here, bring out her curls.
Let's turn off the mask and turn up the exposure a little bit.
One thing I'm noticing is that these highlights up here were already pretty
bright so they're getting a bit of an unnatural look. So I'll go into my erase
tool and just blend those back into the original exposure.
I like to keep checking my before-and-after to make sure i haven't
gone too far with the edits and these are really subtle. Because they're so
subtle i'm actually going to go into my mask and select my dodging and burning
and just bring it out a bit more. So let me see.
So that's my dodging layer, where is my burning?
I'm just gonna burn it in a little bit more.
I'm trying something, I'm just kind of experimenting. I've never
done this before but I want to see what it's like if I make the shadows a little
bit cooler and the highlights a little bit warmer. It could look bad but it never
hurts to try. So i would have to do all over layer.
Again I'm making a new layer
and I'm dodging. And i'm going to put some sun bursts in the corner here.
So let me put my flow all the way up, you can see where there's natural light there's some
on the ground here. I want it to just come in and just touch her head and from
this corner I'll put one, just come in and just touch her hair a little.
Turn off my mask and turn up my exposure and the warmth
It's just gonna touch the sides of
her hair a little bit and I know that this looks a little wild but i like to
go in after and do the erasing.
Just blending it in.
I'm gonna go into my whites here and make sure I have just a little bit of white in the
photo and my blacks. I'm gonna raise the shadows just a tad.
And then i'll go down to the sharpening, the masking, if you press Alt that will show you which parts it's
going to sharpen. And I just want to bring out her eyes a little bit. I don't want to
overdo it.
So there you have it! You can see the before and the after picture. The edits are
fairly subtle and natural but it just looks like the light was warmer, maybe it
was the golden hour and it brings out some of the highlights and shadows on
her face, is a bit more dramatic. If you liked this video and you learned
something,
please subscribe to our channel that would help us out. And also if you'd like
to learn more we have a book, a Lightroom book, that Tony wrote. I'm biased but I
think it's pretty good and it's only nine dollars for the ebook, it comes with
12 hours of videos kind of like these.
Thank you very much.