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dodge and burn

How To Create A Dodge And Burn Photo Signature

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If you want to understand how a photo was worked on, one great way it to generate a Dodge & Burn mask (or a D&B signature). You can then use this signature to learn quite a bit about the dodge and burn that was done on a photo. You get a better “feel” for the brush strokes. To have a better distinction between the dodge and the burn, you can colorize each mask. This is what it looks like:

Since this is such a powerful tool for showing how you worked your photo, we are going to share the process of creating one. (and you can do similar for healing brush for example) .

Dodge & Burn – With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

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If you split an image into its most basic components, you can look at each pixel as the sum of the following info:

  • Brightness
  • Color Tone
  • Saturation

If we look at a black and white photo for example, one only element present in the photo is brightness. So any three-dimensionality is determined exclusively by the (relative) brightness of neighboring pixels. Our brain is trained to “think” that bright pixels are located closer to us, while dark pixels are more likely to be further away.

Retouching Essentials: Are You Having Color Issues When Dodging & Burning? This Might Be The Reason

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Many of the tools inside of Photoshop use various color models and techniques to alter color. If you are not familiar with them you might be creating a lot of trouble for yourself.

A lot of retouching tutorials online will teach you to use a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer with -100 saturation to remove the color information from an image (this should eliminate color distractions when Dodging and burning). If you are following this advice, then you are working with Lightness in the HSL color model, which is very different from how our eyes perceive color…

Here is a quick example why it is a bad idea:

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