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 Dodging and burning is a traditional digital image manipulation technique that is used by many photographers to enhance their images. Photographers have been using this technique to enhance their photos since the very beginning of Photography when film was used. Dodging and burning is a very easy technique with Photoshop. In this Photoshop tutorial, we will show you how to dodge and burn using a non-destructive method that, surprisingly, many people do not know. Doing this non-destructively means that the original image is untouched and all the adjustments are done on a separate layer.

How to Dodge and Burn Non-Destructively with Photoshop

Step 1

Open a photo that you want to dodge and burn. For starters, pick a portrait photo because it is easier to get good results on portraits than landscapes - and it's a lot more fun.

Step 2

First, create a new layer. Choose Layer > New > Layer and enter "Dodge and Burn" as the name of the layer.

Step 3

Choose Edit > Fill and use the settings from the image below. This will fill the layer with a 50% gray. The reason why we use 50% gray as the base color is because when you change the blending mode to overlay, gray will be transparent while anything lighter or darker will be more visible. This way, when you dodge or burn, only the areas that you dodge or burn will be visible.

Now you may ask, why bother filling the layer with gray instead of leaving it transparent? The answer is because you can't dodge or burn on transparent pixels. That is why we need to use a 50% gray layer with an overlay blend mode.

Your layer should be a 50% gray color. Change the blending mode to Overlay and the layer will appear to be transparent.

Step 4

Now we can begin dodging and burning. In the tools palette, you select the dodge or burn tool. I usually like to start with the burn tool but it is up to you which tool you like to use first.

Once you have the tool selected, change the brush hardness to 0%-50%. The harder the brush (higher the %), the more visible and precise the areas that you paint will appear. I usually like to use a hardness of 0% to start off. Sometimes, you don't even need to use a higher hardness.

Step 5

Start burning the areas that you like. Many people like to burn the wrinkles and edges of the skin to create a dramatic effect but there's no rule to dodging and burning; you can burn anywhere you like. Burning basically darkens the area. By darkening the edges of the skin, you can create a moody effect.

If you need to change the brush size, press the [ or ] button to decrease or increase the brush size. To change the hardness, press hold the SHIFT key and press either the [ or ] key to decrease or increase the brush hardness. This makes editing a lot faster.

Step 6

Select the Dodge tool and dodge the areas that you like. For a moody effect, dodge the skin so that it looks like the main light is where the person's eye is looking. For example, in the image below, the woman's eye is looking towards her left shoulder. I brightened the left side of her face to make that area brighter.

Step 7

Choose Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast. You can use this tool to adjust the dodge and burn effects. Because we dodged and burned using this non-destructive technique, we can alter the dodging and burning with the brightness/contrast tool. If you were to do it the destructive method that most people use, you would have to spend a lot more time correcting your dodging and burning with even more dodging and burning.

Final Results

Here is the before and after picture with the areas that I dodged and burned in the middle.