Color Dodge and Color Burn blending modes
Well if the names doens’t give them away you probably don’t know what dodging and burning is.
Dodging and burning is a technique from the wet darkroom where the photograper would let the emulsion darken or lighten areas to control the exposure and for artistic effects.
In photoshop we can dodge and burn to artistically enhance our photos, now photoshop has brush tools specifically for this purpose, the problem with them is that to use them you are doing desctructive edits, NO GOOD.
Color dodge and color burn blending modes to the resque. Create 2 blank layers above the background layer, name one dodging and the other burning. Set the Burning layer to, yes you guessed it, Color Burn blending mode and fill it with white, and the Dodging layer to Color Dodge blending mode and fill it with black.
Now go select your paintbrush tool, set the opacity real low, like 20%. To dodge areas paint on the dodging mode with white, and to burn paint on the burn layer with white. This technique is also commonly called “painting with light” and is a skill you need to develop by practicing a lot, it’s useually most effective with photos with lots of detail, like a photo of a forest or other dramatic landscape, look at the photo and see where the light and shadows fall and try to enhance them by dodging and burning, the nice thing is that you can reverse the effect and paint it away by using the inverse color so it’s very flexible and you can go back and forth endlessly without harming the original pixels of the image.
