Aaron: Hey, guys, welcome to Photoshop.
My name is Aaron Nace.
You can find me on Twitter at aknacer.
Today, I'm going to show you an awesome way to dodge and burn.
Now I know you guys have probably done dodging and burning before, but we're going to go
over a couple of techniques that are a little bit new, a little bit different, and they're
going to help you to get a better result more consistently.
Before we get into today's episode, we just wrapped up our huge, huge contest with over
$1000 in prizes.
All the entries are going out to the judges now, and we're going to have the winners back
to you guys soon.
We'll update you on that soon, but we want to get into this edit.
A very, very cool image, this is actually by Ben and this is his dog Toro.
(Laughter) Just a very … It makes me want to bulldog because man this guy is just awesome.
We're going to use dodging and burning.
Before we do, I'm going to show you guys a couple of things that you're going to need
or maybe not need but are going to really help out.
The first thing that I use is I use a Wacom tablet.
This is an Intuos4 Small, the Intuos5 is out now.
You guys can pick one of those up if you wanted to.
They're not that expensive.
We can link to them below.
They really do help out in editing especially when dodging and burning because you can use
the pressure sensitivity of your pen to dictate how much is actually going to be dodged and
burned.
I work with one of these.
I really like it.
It's something that's going to help you guys out too.
All right.
The next thing we need to do is we need to figure out a good way to do the dodging and
burning.
Now a lot of people will use 50% gray and soft white layers and things like that.
That's totally okay.
There's nothing wrong with that, but what I prefer and what I'm going to show you guys
today is making two separate curves adjustment layers.
We're going to grab an adjustment layer here and I'm going to go down the curves, okay?
We're just going to click on one of these and drag it down.
There we go, something like that, looks pretty good.
Now don't worry about if this isn't perfect just yet.
We can always adjust that.
We're going to drag that one down and then we're going to click and grab another curve
adjustment layer.
We're just going to drag this guy up.
Okay, so we have our layer that's going to be dodging and our layer that's going to be
burning.
We're just going to do them separately.
The one thing that we want to do … Let's just choose a totally normal brush.
I'm going to choose a regular brush, here something that's in Photoshop supplied by
Photoshop.
I'm going to start off by making our layer mask black, by the way.
I'm going to hit command I, and that's going to make our layer mask black.
Let's get to these settings that you guys might have in your Photoshop.
Basically, when a layer mask is black, you can paint white on it.
It's going to make whatever's on that layer visible.
In this case, it's making things a little bit darker which is basically, this is our
burn layer.
If I start painting in, with how this is set up, we can see the brush is relatively hard
edged.
We're painting in an opacity of 100 and a flow of 100, and we can see I have almost
no control over what I'm doing.
I'm just kind of painting in where it is, but it's just like … At this point, it's
an on or off type of thing.
You can see this is … I'm not being able to get very good results with this.
I can hit X for switch between black and white.
When I paint black on my layered mask, it's going to go away.
At this point, I'm just painting visible or not visible.
Here's a good thing we're going to show you.
I'm going to show you guys the difference between opacity and flow and how those are
going to help you out.
Let's just make those invisible, and we're going to set you up with a brush that's going
to help you out in dodging and burning much better.
The difference between opacity and flow … Let's just get a red color something you guys can
actually see.
Both opacity and flow are at 100%.
When I paint around, it just looks like this.
This is on or off.
There's not a whole lot in between.
If I bring my opacity down to something like 40, at 50%, I'm going to paint around and
you're going to be able to see through it, but as long as I don't lift up my cursor,
it's just going to be the same color over and over again no matter where I paint.
Now if I lift up and start painting again, you can see it kind of doubles up.
I can lift up and start painting again and it's going to double up again.
Where I've lifted up and painted over and over again, it's kind of doubling up, but
we're still at a lower flow, sorry, lower opacity out towards the edges.
That's always going to stay at 48% opacity because that's what we chose it.
Okay, let's just delete that out.
Let's bring our opacity back up to 100%, and let's bring our flow down.
Bringing your flow down to about, I don't know, 10% or so, you can see basically, it's
going to look like it's doing … it's a siren outside, we're in Chicago … there's a lot
of murders and fires and things like that here.
It's a great city — come visit.
(Laughter) If I bring my opacity, sorry my flow down to 10% or so, we can see off the
bat, it looks a lot like bringing your opacity down like if I'm painting, things like that.
The difference is with flow if you go over the same area over and over again, it's going
to build up.
It's going to build up your effect over and over and over again.
What you're able to do is have a lot more control over what you're painting.
Instead of just being on or off at this point, you can actually build that up over and over
and over again.
Flow is a much better way to get control.
It's because you can just go over and over again.
Now if you guys don't have a pressure sensitive tablet, I would recommend keeping your flow
down really low, something like, even like 3%.
There we go, we can kind of see just building that up more and more and more.
If you do have a pressure sensitive tablet, here's what I would recommend.
Go up to window and down here to brush.
So we're on this current brush.
It really doesn't matter which you're on.
Go to your brush-shaped dynamics.
I would turn on the control of your size here.
This is how large or how small it's going to get based on how hard you press your pen
down.
Pump up your minimum diameter just a little bit.
We can see our brush strokes down there.
It's going to get smaller as you let go and larger as you press a little harder.
I would also make sure you turn this transfer on.
You want your flow jitter over here.
You don't need to crank that up but turn your flow jitter on to pen pressure.
That's the harder you press, the more ink is going to come out; the softer you press,
the less.
Let's bring our flow up to maybe 20%.
If I don't press very hard, we can see not a lot happens.
Let's bring it down to 10% or so.
All right.
If I'm not pressing very hard, really not a whole lot happens, but the harder I press,
we can see instantly I'm putting down a lot more.
We can see that's a huge difference using flow instead of just having this be at 100%
and having that … There's a pretty big difference.
That's the control that we're going to need when we're dodging and burning and to make
your brush that way and then you're going to be able to dodge and burn much better.
Let's choose that brush that we just made.
Here we're going to go.
Instead of just being on or off at this point, what we're going to do … I'm going to go
ahead and fill that with black again … I can paint now, and I'm just going to paint
white over the areas that I want to be a little bit darker.
You can see I'm just going over and over again.
I'm not lifting my brush up.
I'm just painting over and over again, back and forth.
When it looks like it's dark enough, I just let go.
I back up off of there or I move to a different space.
You don't even have to let go actually.
You can just move somewhere else.
As I go around, what I'm doing is I'm looking for the dark areas in the image.
I'm just going in here and making them a little bit darker.
That's the whole idea with dodging and burning.
You just want to take the dark areas, make them a little bit darker.
Take your light areas and make them a little bit lighter.
There we go.
It's going to be a lot more subtle, and we're going to have a lot more control over what
we're doing.
You can do quite a bit to actually sculpt out a shape with this.
This is just burning.
This is just making things a little bit darker.
I'll show you guys the before and the after with that.
You can see how this is relatively flat.
I mean it's a bulldog.
It's not incredibly flat, but now we can see there's a lot more depth.
It really does look like it's … There's more depth in the folds of the fat on his
face which is so cute.
(Laughter) That's the whole idea with dodging and burning.
You're just going to be able to add a lot more of this definition in, but it's really
important that you do the first part of this tutorial.
You get yourself working with a brush that's actually going to allow you to have control
because if not, you're just painting in the dark.
It's just going to be on or off, and there's really not a whole lot you can do.
Now his face has been a little bit probably dodge and burn already which is very cool.
I'm just kind of going even more, but if this were straight out of the camera, you would
see these effects come to life even more.
There we go.
Let's darken up the jowls of Toro over there — that's a pretty good name.
If you guys have a bulldog … what's the name of your bulldog?
Even if you don't, what's the name of your dog?
Toro is a pretty cool name.
I like that name.
I met a dog when I was traveling, and his name was Oso which was Spanish for bear, and
it was like a big chow.
I really like that name too.
If I ever get a chow, I'm going to name him Oso and copy.
All right, there we go.
Let's paint all this darker under there.
Okay.
We can see that's kind of darkened things up.
Now the same is true with our dodging.
We want to lighten things up as well.
I'm just going to paint white on our layer mask.
This is just going to make this layer visible.
There we go.
These areas, you just want to kind of go over the highlights.
The same like we made the shadows a little bit darker.
Now we're going to take the highlights, and we're just going to make them a little bit
lighter.
Okay.
Here in the face area, that probably was already done.
Again, we're not going to see it as much, but everywhere else should stand out quite
a bit more.
Dodging and burning is a whole lot of fun.
You can really change an image and get a much nicer effect and really make something a lot
more dynamic.
Now you guys know how to do it the easy and the right way and the way that's going to
give you a lot of control over what you're actually doing in Photoshop.
Let's just show you guys the before and the after.
There's the before and the after of our bulldog.
If you guys want to back these down … Let's say your darks are too dark, all you have
to do is click right in here, excuse me, double click and then you can just control how dark
or how light your dodging and your burning is.
All right.
(Coughing) I'm getting all choked up.
I just love this image so much.
(Laughter) All right.
I don't know what happened there.
I can't talk and photoshop at the same time.
We can control how light or how dark these things are as well, which is why I prefer
doing this to other methods because you'd have a lot more control even after you've
painted.
Cool.
Guys, I hope you liked this method of dodging and burning.
Thanks so much for watching, and make sure you get those pen pressure things set right.
If you are using a Wacom tablet, that flow set to pen pressure is going to really, really
change some things for you guys.
I can't wait to see your results.
Post them down below.
Let me know the name of your dog, dogs.
See you guys later.
Bye everyone.