Photoshop Tutorial Series

Color Correcting  |  Dodge & Burn  |  Sharpen

A Dodge and Burn Tutorial

Someone wonder why the sky in their photos is not as blue as others', and the trees are not green enough.  Look at the following example, and you may think it is OK.  but, is that enough?  Today we will try some simply techniques to make it much better, mainly Dodge, and Burn.  The former one lets colors brighter, and the latter darken them.

First, we select the area to be burned, i.e., the sky.  We use Magic Wand Tool, and the default Tolerance is 32, Anti-alias, and Contiguous.  That is fine, and we will use the default settings.  To select multiple areas, hold the Shift Key and press Left Mouse Button.

Ok, now you have already selected out the sky, and you don't want the area to be too harsh, so use Select --> Feather.  I use Radius 20 here.

Then we are going to modify the image.  We don't wanna hurt the original image (background), so we add a copy of background as the new layer.  Then click Add Layer Mask icon (the third icon from the left) to add a mask, or an alpha channel.

Right now you don't notice any change, and you have to choose Layer Blend Mode.  You could choose either one from 'Darken, Multiply, Color Burn, Linear Burn'.  They have the similar effect, and you can choose the one you like best.  I choose Color Burn here.  Now you see the sky is much darker than original, or you can say, it is BLUER.

Next, we are gonna to modify the trees, to make them greener.  Similar to previous steps, we use Magic Wand Tool to select the tree areas, and then use Feature to smooth the edges of selected area.

Then the same as before, Duplicate the Background Layer, and Add Layer Mask.  Then, in the Layer Blend Mode, choose one from 'Lighten, Screen, Color Dodge or Linear Dodge'.  In my case, Linear Dodge works best, so I choose it.  Tata, the trees are much greener than before!!

Maybe you think you've done too much to make them blue and green, so it looks kinda unnatural.  So you can always reduce the effect by decreasing the Opacity from 100% (full effect) to 0% (no effect). 

Or maybe you want to continue to increase the effect, then repeat the Dodge and Burn several times.

Here is the comparison again, before and after.  It may not be a perfect example, but you can always spend some time on that to make it better.

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