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Paul Gallagher dodge & burn

by Paul Gallagher

As the title suggests, the phrase dodging and burning originated in the darkroom. To lighten an area of the image you would "dodge" or prevent light from hitting the photographic paper on the easel or "burn" where you would mask selected areas of the paper from the light of the enlarger and deliberately allow other areas to receive light. I no longer have a darkroom, and use a scanner and Photoshop, but even in my introductory paragraph referring to darkroom methods, you see familiar Photoshop words such as "mask" and "selected" appearing.

In this article I will not endeavour to go into the in-depth complexities of what can be done in Photoshop and the vast array of tools that are at hand. Indeed there are many fantastically advanced ways of adjusting and editing images accurately, but it is worth bearing in mind that when all we had to hand was a darkroom, many of these tools where nonexistent, yet the greats, like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, produced beautifully crafted images. I will begin with dodging and burning because this is one of the main ways of adjusting the appearance of an image during printing.

The first step is to open the image you want to work on and decide the first area you think needs adjusting. In this feature it is an image of a storm clearing on a beach at the south coast of the Isle of Arran, in Scotland. As you can see from the scanned negative, the rocks on the beach hold a lot of detail but the sky is somewhat pale, however, it has a lot of potential (FIG1).

I start by selecting the sky using the Magic Wand, set to a tolerance of 25. Simply press the shift key with the Magic Wand selected and gradually select the sky area (FIG2). If you want to remove an area that has been selected by the Magic Wand then hold down the Alt key and click on that area.

It is worth zooming into the image when the selection looks complete to double-check there are no areas missed. When the sky is selected, I then click on the Channels tab (FIG3) and click on the "save selection as an alpha channel" (the second icon from the left). A small black and white channel icon appears which is then renamed "sharp". Then copy this channel by dragging it onto the new channel icon (the peeling page) and rename it "Blurred". After this go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and apply a blur of 3 pixels (FIG4).

At this point we need to return to the image and begin adjusting the sky using the channels and selections made so far. Switch from the "Blurred" channel to the default RGB channel; then click the layers tab on the layers pallet. This will return you to the original image, with the marching ants depicting the active selection (FIG5). Then click the new Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the layers pallet and select Curves.

At this point the marching ants will disappear and a Curves dialogue box will appear. Adjust the tonality of the sky by dragging sections of the straight line. If you look at the axis of the curves' dialogue box you can see the greyscale from white to black. Therefore if you pull the line in the corner of the box closest to the black downwards it will darken the darkest pixels predominantly over the lightest pixels further away from your drag point (FIG6).

You can place a number of points on the curve to alter the contrast along tonal range to varying degrees but it is worth starting with fewer control points. As a general rule smooth curves work best.

Now that we have made our initial adjustment of the sky we should return to the Channels pallet and control click the "Blurred" alpha channel. This will reload the selection of the sky and if we then return to the Layers pallet and press control-shift-I this will invert the selection and enable us to begin working on the beach area of the image (FIG7).

We can now press the New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers pallet, select Curves and make the desired adjustments on the foreground. What this does is enable us to work on both halves of the image with virtually no overlaps or ugly adjustment lines in the image.

Another method of dodging and burning, as devised by Dan Burkholder, is to first make a new layer and set the "Mode" in the dialoguewww box to "soft light", check the "fill with soft light neutral colour (50%)" and click okay. Then select a brush from the tools pallet, set the flow to about 5%. When you have the foreground colour in the tools pallet set to black and then brush over the image, it will gradually darken. Conversely when the foreground colour is set to white when you brush over the image, the area will gradually lighten. You can adjust the flow of the brush, and the hardness and size to suit your needs (FIG8).

A method I use is to select the Lasso tool from the tools pallet and apply a large feather prior to making a selection. Make a selection in the image and then click on the New Adjustment Layer icon in the Layers pallet and select Curves. As with the alpha channel method you can now "bend" the straight line until you achieve the desired tonal range in that part of the image and because it is an Adjustment Layer you can return to it later to make finer adjustments (by double clicking the icon in the Layers Palette).

It is worth noting that if you are aiming to burn or dodge at the edge of an image using the lasso tool you can hold down the alt key and select "off canvas" to prevent the having a localised "halo" effect on the inside edge of your image (FIG9).



Updated 27/04/2026 16:44:22 Last Modified: Monday, 27 April 2026