The Fastest Way To Dodge And Burn In Photoshop

On this video tutorial Aaron Nace from Phlearn demonstrates how to quickly dodge and burn in Photoshop to emphasize your highlights and darken your shadows.

Dodging and burning is an old technique which gives a lot more depth and form and help improve images which end to look a little bit flat. As always don’t work on the background layer (so duplicate it) and then desaturate it and change the layer blend mode to vivid light and finally use a low pass filter. This sharpens the image and now you can move to actual dodging and burning using a layer mask (as you can see Nace doing in the video – the steps might look a bit tricky but you can repeat this part of the video as needed).

This is not the first time Nace covers this topic. In the past we published here a previous video where he looks at “How to Color Dodge in Photoshop” which is also worth checking out if you are getting into dodging and burning in PS.

You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section (and you can find a lot more Phlearn videos on our special Phlearn subsection).

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.