Increase highlights & Shadows with Burn & Dodge tool in Photoshop

Dodging and Burning can help you brighten and darken small or big areas of your photo instantly. I advise using this only for small touch ups as it is directly applied onto your photo so it is difficult to reverse the effect.

Before you start, you should duplicate your photo so that you can start over if you mess up.

Click on the Dodge tool from the tool menu or shortcut key O

Shift+O to cycle between the tool, each tool has it’s own individual setting

Holding Alt/Option will temporary switch to the Burn tool if you are on Dodge tool and vice versa but the temporary tool will inherited the settings of the current tool.

Range will determined what tones to affect first.

Highlights will affect the lightest tones first.

Midtones will affect everything the same

Shadow will affect darkest area first

In the sample above I circle the area where I will be applying the dodge tool and in each of the mode, as you can see dodge works well in Highlights mode, but in Shadows and Midtones mode the result are unpleasant.

Burn tool is the opposite of dodge tool, Shadows mode gives the best result in darkening the shadow and darkening the highlights.

Exposure is the strength of the tool, the higher the strength the more dramatic the result.

the tools work best on black and white image as it could distort the colors, try working on it under the LAB mode and paint only on the lightnesschannel. Go to menu and go to Image-Mode-LAB Color than in the Channels pallet select the Lightness channel, you can turn the other channel back on without effecting them by clicking on their “eye” icon.

You can get the same effect by painting on a blank layer that is set to Overlay or SoftLight. Anything that is painted white will give you a dodge effect and black will have burn effect.

Before the blending mode is applied, I painted some white and Black on a blank layer.

I applied the overlay blending mode on the blank layer I just painted on.

The softlight blending mode is applied to this one.

This will give you better control as you are not directly changing the photo which mean you can simply delete the layer if you make a mistake. You can have more than one layer if you need and if effects everything below this layer.

Do you have more tips and tricks regarding the Dodge and Burn tool? If so please leave it in the comment below.

This is part of my tutorial set. Please visit the TUTORIAL PAGE for a list of all the tutorials.