Dodged – A Burn/Dodge Photoshop Manipulation
The Annenberg Space for Photography is currently featuring their Extreme Exposure exhibit showcasing some of the most incredible photographs taken in extreme environments/conditions, and one artist in particular inspired this new project. Clyde Butcher is known for his incredible Black and White prints, and what sets him apart in the digital age is his method… he dodges and burns every print individually by hand in his own custom fitted darkroom. While I don’t have access to the type of studio Clyde has, he inspired me to take on this next project using the tools in Photoshop to Dodge/Burn my own photograph.
Original Image (*Note, this image is credited to Barcelona Photoblog):
Step 1 – Burning Shadows & Dodging Highlights: This first step is pretty simple and is by no means an exact science. The goal is to bring out and enhance the dramatic lighting of our subject, in this case, a wall mounted water faucet. For the first pass, I lowered exposure to around 10% and using a soft brush, painted over the highlighted areas with the Dodge tool to emphasize and exaggerate the lighting. I made a number of passes using different brush sizes until I was happy with the result, whereupon I switched to the Burn tool and brushed over the shadows to deepen the contrast.
Step 2 – Isolating the Subject: With the subject now accented, I wanted to make it pop and contrast against the background. After resetting the exposure to 100% I used a large soft brush and made a few passes over the background using the Burn tool to darken the contrast. Interestingly, a few unintended side-effects occurred. Burning the background created this cool overly saturated watercolor look & feel while bringing out this rich gritty texture of the concrete wall in the foreground. I played around with the balance and varied the brush size/ exposure until I was happy with the result.
Step 3 – Dry Brush Filter: I loved the way the background looked almost like a painting and wanted to play with this effect by applying a Dry Brush filter. The image looked a little harsh so I upped the brush size and detail while lowering the texture to get a nice hand painted look and feel. Upon closer inspection, the image looked a little too pixelated, so using the Smudge tool at 50% strength with a large soft brush I drew small tight circles to remove the pixelated edges while being careful not to damage the image’s integrity.
Step 4 – Blending Layers: Now to bring back the rich textures, shadows & highlights. Using a simple layer overlay, I duplicated and pasted Step 2 above the newly created layer and using a soft brush with around a 10% Opacity/15% Flow, erased areas of the original to bring out elements of the new layer from Step 3. The soft brush with a low opacity and flow allows for a subtle integration of elements with a blending of both layers.
Step 5 – Retouching highlights/shadows: There is only so much the Burn/Dodge tools can do, so to further enhance the light & darkness relationship, I created a new layer and drew in a few additional shadows and highlights.
Step 6 – Lens Flare: As a finishing touch, I added in a 50-300mm Zoom Lens flare and adjusted the brightness/positioning to place the flare directly over the white highlight I created in the previous step.
The high-res can be seen in my “Photoshop” section by clicking the image below:
