Dodging & Burning for Digital Enhancement

Hi All!

It's been a while since I've posted up my articles. Well, I've managed to get some good rest from work this CNY holidays and it has also given me some time to explore the hobby I love, photography and anything to do with it! 
Well, this time around I'll be describing a digital photo editing effects, one which is not new to some of our professional photographers but is nevertheless a contemporary and interesting effect to be applied for those adventurous one.

I am talking about digital Dodging and Burning.

Dodging and burning are two simple techniques which you can use to enhance to dynamic level of your digital photographs further. Although dodging and burning is not a new technique and has been practiced by film photographers manually in the past, it has been revived in a new style of digital photo editing - to stretch & compress the dynamic level of digital images.

Simply put, you are not just adjusting brightness, saturation and contrast, you can also edit parts of your photos independantly to create a kind of hyper-realistic image.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography has its roots in this, but I'd look at this two effects differently. Where HDR is more of a automated or technical effect, manual dodging and burning is more of a subjective effect as intepreted by the photographer.

The Photography 

The effect works best with shots that have been taken with "planned" lighting. You can see example of these with works by Jill Greenberg and Dave Hill the combination of soft frontal lighting, side highlights and several spots for selected background.

These are the "base" for this sort of editing effects, because you will be dodging the highlights created by the lights and burning the original shadows. In this manner you are not creating something fake but rather enhancing what is already created in your photography.

Of course, you can still get good lighting with basic equipment and you can still apply some of these effects with just a camera's on-board flash or a speelight, but the effects are not as obvious.

I'll cut the explanations short and explain with these pics as I go along.

The Examples

Here is a before & after picture set that highlight the difference between a non-edited picture and one that has been dodged and burnt.



 

Here is an explanation of what was done to this picture





Here is another two example:



 
See the difference between the two?

The first is a good picture but the colour level throughout the picture
is constant and the model blends in with the background. In the
second picture, the skin of the model has been enhanced with highlights
and well-placed shadows and the background has been burnt to darken
the otherwise distracting elements.

The Techniques

It's quite simple to start the process.

1. You should begin with a well exposed image of your subject.
2. To lighten parts of your image, use the dodge function and burn to darken.
3. Set the "exposure" (or opacity) level of the brush to about 10%. You can adjust this figure but for me, this is best to make fine d&b adjustments to my picture.
4. Use and a suitably sized brush. Remember, you will need to constantly resize your brush throughout the process of dodging and burning.
5. You should be dodging and burning with a few passes. The more passes you make, the more the effects will be applied.
6. Apply a high contrast setting for your picture to further make your picture "pop".
7. Once you are satisfied with the adjustments, you can either finish it off like that or apply further enhancements with saturation and sharpness.

The effects doesn't have to be as overwhelming as some of the effects you may have seen but even a slight application of the technique can help to create a stronger impact.



 



You can see some more example of these effect as well as some HDR examples here : CLICK HERE

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by sharpshooter via PM: 12-10-2009