 Hey everybody it's Gary back to here and in this video I'm going to show you how to dodge and burn in Photoshop. All right let's get started. Okay so there's a couple of different ways that you can do dodge and burn we've just duplicated our background layer here. I'm going to show you two different methods I'm going to show you the one I prefer but sometimes I use both. All right so let's start with working non-destructively so we've already made a copy of our background layer. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to create a dodge and burn layer and so one way to do that is if you come down here to the bottom here by the garbage can you see this little thing here if you hold down on the option key on the Mac alt on the PC if you click here it'll open up the dialog box called new layer we can call this one dodge. Now go down to mode so this is your blend mode and choose soft light. Now once you've done that check the box that says fill with soft light neutral color 50 gray then say okay. Now you'll see a layer here called dodge. Now what we can do is we can hit command j on the Mac or control j on the PC we can duplicate that layer we'll call this one burn that's the easiest way to do that. So now we have a dodge and burn layer and we could also put this in a group so if we click on one and then hold the shift key click on the other and say command g or control g on the PC now we have them in a group and we can call this just we'll just say db so now we have a dodge and burn layer that we can toggle on and off so we're going to start by dodging first and I'll show you the areas of the phase to dodge and burn. Now we're going to use the brush so B is the shortcut for the brush and I'll show you the settings that I like to use if you go up to the top here look at your opacity I like to use an opacity of 100 and a really low flow for this I like to use a flow between one and two percent and build up gradually. Now to dodge we want the white to be our foreground color so you can see we're on white now let's just pick another color for example say you're in photoshopping you'll look left here and you see that it's red and black if you hit the x key that toggles the foreground and background but to get white if you hit the d key now you see black and white if you hit the x key now white is the foreground color so you'll be dodging with white all right so we're on the dodge layer here make sure that's enabled make sure you're white make sure your opacity is 100 your flows only 1% to 2% all right let's start dodging so I'm going to show you I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to show you the areas to dodge and burn I'm just going to bring this up to the top and then we'll delete that when we're done so I'm going to choose a red color to show you right here the dodge areas all right so the areas that you normally dodge and I'll just make this flow a little bit higher so you can see and I'll make my brush smaller I'm just using the bracket key so you normally would dodge in this area here this area here this area here under the eyes sometimes up under this area too here sometimes right under the eyebrow and then usually on the chin so that's when you're working on the face now those are normally areas of dodging so brightening so I'll just delete this layer just make it easier and I'll make a new one here and the areas of burning those are going to be areas that you darken I would normally darken around the hairline I would add a little contour so you can see she already has a bit of shadow and a bit of contouring with her makeup there and then you can also contour on the outside of the nose and sometimes here depending I don't always do it there but that'll give you some contouring so it's best to work slowly and build up because you can go overboard and then flatten someone's face or really make them look unattractive but we can also use the opacity slider to lessen the effect of what we're doing as well so I'm going to delete that layer all right so now when I do dodging and burning I like to do two different methods so I like to really zoom in and get the smaller fine details and then I like to do more of a broader scope so let's start with the fine details so one thing that I find really helps is if you come down here and you choose a black and white layer and if you drag the red slider let's just say to about minus 60 drag this down to about minus 50 you could see that the image becomes very dark but now we can focus on areas of lightness and darkness so we're going to go to the dodge zoom in command plus is the shortcut on the Mac and you should do your skin cleanup first so any types of blemishes that you may have I suggest use the healing brush get rid of any of those blemishes and then this will help to refine it and this is where I go in really close and just try to clean up some of the darker areas and then I do a broader dodge and burn and I'll show you the second method for that just so you get to see two ways to do this all right so we've got that black and white and now it allows us to see slightly darker areas so again hit the B key the brush key you see we have red and white over there if I hit the D key it becomes black and white at the X key white is on the foreground I'm on the dodge layer so I'm dodging and then I just want to look for a area of darkness so again opacity 100 flow of one and I'm just going to do small areas so I'm going to zoom in I'm at about 500% there and I'm just going to look for little areas that are slightly darker and what I'll do is I'll probably speed this up a little bit because you'll get the idea of how this works but basically I'm just looking for areas of darkness and I'm trying to get them to blend in surrounding areas now this is another way to remove blemishes in a sense because anything that's raised is going to be brighter so if you have a bump in the skin the top of the bump is going to be brighter than the lower portion so I'm just really trying to even out some of the lighting that's created by just bumps on the skin so areas that are higher are going to be brighter and areas that are lower are going to be darker and so by lightening the darker areas I'm smoothing out the surface of the skin so that's basically how this works now you can also get really small here and then you can refine some of the lines under the eyes because I don't think it's a good idea to totally blur out people's skin so the idea of this is just to lighten some of the creases under the eye and again we're going to do a larger dodge and burn after this and you'll see how that works but this is just sort of a fine dodging and burning technique that I like to do just to sort of get the fine lines a little bit lighter and like I said I'm just at a flow of about one percent here you could bump that up to about two percent but I like to just keep it really low so that I don't go overboard and I'm really just focusing on darker areas and what I'll do is I'll do the eyes a different method I'll have another video for eyes and this is basically just what I'm doing so I think what I'll do is I'll speed this up and then we'll get to the second part of the dodge and burn technique all right I'm just going to fast forward through some of this micro dodging now I also have other videos on skin retouching I'll put them down below this video in the description box I also have a link to the behind the scenes of the lighting of the shot that you're looking at right now I'll put that below in the description box too all right so we're back now I just want to show you this I'm going to take this black and white layer I'm going to get rid of this and we didn't use this burn layer in this that's just how I do it I usually do dodge and one layer burn in this layer but at this stage I don't do any burning I save that for the second stage so here we are I'm just going to toggle this group on and off and really it's so small you probably wouldn't even notice these differences but I think in the whole it all comes together a little bit better so I'm just going to toggle this on and off so this is with it off and so just look at areas here in the forehead around the nose and under the eyes now this is just very subtle and you could see that it just slightly lightens so with this first step is just really the fine details really going in and blessing some of those lines under the eyes any little dark spots and then we're going to do more of a global overall dodge and burn now you can skip this step if you want this is just if you want to get really granular with it so now we're just going to close this group now another way of doing dodge and burn it's come down here and you can create a curves layer now to dodge you would just boost everything up and to burn you would just take everything down now so let's just do another example of dodging here so what's good about this technique is you could never get brighter than what you set your curves layer to again of course you can always lower the opacity with the other method same as this but at least this way you know that you're never going to get this bright if you set it this bright for example so once you've got that curves layer you can toggle that on and off you want to create a mask so what you can do is just hit command i or control i in your keyboard when you're clicked on that mask and now the mask will only appear when we paint in white so again we're painting with a brush in white I like to keep my flow around one to two percent same thing here now the only difference is now is we're just going to do a more of a global so a larger dodge and burn so I'm just going to make my brush a little bit bigger now a couple of shortcuts too if you right click you could see there's the dimensions and things like that but also too if you hold the option key and the control key on the Mac if I go left my brush gets smaller if I go right it gets bigger if I go up it gets softer if I drag down it gets harder so I'm on a tablet so I'm going to drag up for maximum softness and then again I can hold those keys and go left and so what I'll do is with the dodging is I'll start with a slightly larger brush and then I'll make the brush smaller so a couple strokes there and then I can make my brush smaller and then a couple more strokes and then smaller again and so I'm really making that highlight a little brighter in the center and it's just sort of a graduation of the size of the brush so hopefully that makes sense now again here we're going to add a little bit of brightness I'm just going to do that because the nose is smaller I don't necessarily need it to be bigger but again you can do that same technique like that and if you ever feel like you went too far you can lower the brightness by the opacity or just dragging that down and again I always just start out with gradual adjustments and then I work up to it and then if I think I went too far then I can always adjust that so again we're kind of working in this area we're working right here on the bridge of the nose under the eyes here and these are the patterns that I showed you earlier and you don't want to go too crazy with this because you can really flatten out someone's skin so I'm just going to toggle that on and off and you can see that it's starting to improve those areas if you think you went too far you can always just adjust the opacity slider now we can use the same method to do dodging and burning like I said now one thing I like to do too with the curves layer is go to the blend mode and if you choose luminosity then it only affects the brightness so it doesn't affect the color so when you push up on a curves layer sometimes it adjusts the colors as well make sure if you're using curves to dodge and burn that you use the luminosity blend mode so let's do that again so we're going to create another curves layer we're going to click on curves this time we're going to burn so we're going to bring it down and then we're going to change the blend mode to luminosity all right and then the mask you click on command eye so now we paint in white over the mask just like we were doing with the dodging except we're going to emphasize certain areas so sometimes I like to take the eyebrows down a little bit so I'll work on the eyebrows here sometimes the hairline sometimes if there's a part in the hair it's nice to darken that area then we'll go a little bigger here and then we're just going to bring in a little bit of burning and contouring in this area here and then again what we can do is we can refine the edges of the nose so just sort of refine the contour of the nose and then you can see there's a natural shadow under her nose we shot this with butterfly lighting and we're using a mola set I have a behind the scenes of this shoot so I'll put a link below in the description if you want to check out the behind the scenes of how we lit this shot and then again there's some contouring here on the cheeks and then I just bring things in gradually and then again like I said it's on its own layer and so this is the technique really that's the curves layer I showed you the other method before that and it's just a matter of building this up slowly and then toggling it on and off so this is the burning and you can see we're just building up really slowly with this also to anywhere where there's makeup that's dark you can also emphasize that a little bit more too if you want it to so you can burn in these areas here as well as well as the pupil and then what I'll do is I'll brighten the catch light in the eyes as well as also brighten the eyes that's going to be in another video so I just go around and just sort of build up slowly I don't like to rush it and it's up to you really if you want to do this quickly you can just increase your flow and you can do it as fast as you'd like so I hope you enjoyed this video that's my two techniques for dodging and burning in photoshop and if you have any questions or comments you can post them down below also if you're not already a subscriber hit that subscribe button give me a thumbs up hit that thumbs up that like button also click on share and feel free to share this on facebook photography groups forums twitter wherever you'd like all right thanks again it's great back to here and I'll see you in the next video