Dodge & burn—the complete guide

Dodge & burn is one part of retouching you simply have to know if you want to edit photos of people. I don't necessarily mean strictly commercial photography with models. Dodge & burn can be useful even in portrait work, just on a smaller scale. Unlike other techniques, it preserves the skin's texture completely, though its uses don't end with skin—it also helps with clothes, backgrounds, and hair. It would be hard to explain this in an article without boring nine out of ten people, so I made the whole thing as a video.

In the video below, I explain how all of this works, so it's a kind of tutorial. In the earlier videos I posted on YouTube, you can see the exact situations where I use it. More videos will appear over time, perhaps focused exclusively on dodge & burn.

 

Setup

Below is a cheat sheet for the settings I discussed in the video. The link to the tablet settings is a little farther down.

Links

• If you want d&b to be enjoyable rather than torture, you should have a pen tablet. I wrote about them here.