There are many ways to perform dodge and burn in Photoshop. But have you ever tried to introduce color into the process? Matt Shannon shows you how in this great tutorial video.
Photoshop has special dodge and burn tools, which you can apply on a solid layer. You usually find the "Dodge Tool" and the "Burn Tool" in the tools panel on the left. A more flexible and less destructive approach than using these tools is creating an empty "Soft Light" layer at the top of your layers palette and painting it with black to burn and white to dodge. You can gradually build the effect using low opacity while painting with a soft brush. If you don't like the result, use the "Eraser Tool" to selectively remove the effect again or reduce the opacity of the whole layer.
Shannon also likes to use dodge and burn on his photos. But he approaches it slightly differently and works with two layers using different blend modes instead of a single dodge and burn layer. He also doesn't simply use black and white; instead, he works with "Solid Color..." layers to introduce color contrasts to his images. Watch his video to see the surprising results he gets with just two layers and some selective masking.
At the end of his video, he also shares a way to replicate this technique in Lightroom. You can achieve similar results, but Photoshop provides much more control during fine-tuning.
There are certainly more ways to do dodge and burn. Let us know in the comments how you like to do it.
