As advanced as editing tools have become in recent years, dodging and burning remains as one of the most fundamental and powerful techniques for shaping the light in your images, de-emphasizing blemishes, and drawing attention to your subject in a natural but compelling fashion. This excellent video tutorial will show you how to use dodging and burning for editing portraits in Photoshop.
Coming to you from Kayleigh June, the helpful video tutorial will show you how to dodge and burn a portrait using Photoshop. "Dodge" and "burn" are holdover terms from the film era and simply terms for selectively lightening and darkening areas of an image. Dodging and burning is a tremendously powerful tool. Used more globally on an image, it can help to shape light and draw attention to your subject, while used more locally, it is a very natural and effective retouching tool; in fact, it is the technique of choice for many top-level retouchers. The thing to remember with dodging and burning is to build up the effect slowly and to not work against the light that is already there; the technique to useful for augmenting existing lighting, not replacing bad execution. Check out the video above for the full rundown from June.
