One of the most important parts of your workflow… automated!

Dodging and Burning is one of the most important parts of your workflow.  I would put it right up there with Noise Reduction and Sharpening.  It is a time when you get to dictate where the viewer pays their attention by pushing and pulling the photo in your favor.  It is also a time when you can fix some lighting issues that may have occurred in the original capture.  Anyway you look at it, Dodging and Burning should be a very important part of your workflow.

The effect may appear subtle in the before and after preview, but watch the video tutorial to see how effective it is.

This week I was adding a Soft Light Glow to one of my photos when I accidentally removed the saturation from the glow layer.  At first I was tempted to press “CTRL+Z” to take a step back, but then I realized that the layer looked like a Dodge and Burn layer.  After further analysis, I came to realize that I had automatically dodged my highlights and burned my shadows!  While this is not quite selective dodging and burning by hand, it creates a VERY nice jumping off point for further dodge and burn work by doing the bulk of the labor for you.

In this tutorial, I will briefly show you Traditional Dodging and Burning (if you want more on this topic, see this tutorial) and then move into how you can automatically Dodge and Burn your images.

Download the Actions

 

Blake Rudis
f.64 Academy and f.64 Elite are the brainchildren of Blake Rudis. While he is a landscape photographer, he is most passionate about post-processing images in Photoshop and mentoring others.

For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!
Blake Rudis on EmailBlake Rudis on FacebookBlake Rudis on InstagramBlake Rudis on PinterestBlake Rudis on TwitterBlake Rudis on Youtube