Kens Photoshop Blog

You may have come across photos that looks allmost like a 3D rendering, model and fasion photos, or product photos that look so smooth as to be allmost CG generated.

This is done by skillfull retouchers using dodge and burn in Photoshop. Basically you have to learn about light and shadow and how they shape an image. For example wrinkles in skin, if you zoom all the way in to a single wrinkle you will notice that it’s nothing but shadow and light. Dodge the shadow part and burn the light part of the wrinkle and it will dissapear like magic, but it’s just manipulation of shadow and light.

Look at a model shot. Notice facial features like cheekbones, the curves on the body etc.. Now try to burn the shadows and dodge the light areas, just look at the image and you will see how they fall. If you want to enhance a feature simply darken the existing shadows and lighten the existing light areas and you will notice that the shape is greatly enhanced.

Look at clothes on a model. Zoom in and carefully enhance the existing light and shadows in the wrinkles of the clothes and you will notice that they take on a silky smooth look, all light manipulation.

When using the dodge and burn, make sure you set your brush to be as soft as possible and work at 10% opacity, just build up slowly and the magic will happen after some practice. When you get realy good at dodging and burning, you can actually add body features that were not even there in the first place. For example if a model needs some more muscles or muscle definition you can dodge and burn to create shadows and highlights that looks exactly like the model had extra muscles. Try burning a leg softly in the middle of a large leg muscle that’s round, you will see you get close to something that looks like a defined muscle where none was before.

The great thing about using dodge and burn to enhance shape instead of the liquify command, is that you are not actually moving pixels, so looking at before and after images won’t show any pixel manipulation, it will just look like lighting has changed.

What’s that you say? Don’t have a steady hand? Ok, here’s a trick that will work for larger areas like hips, joints, cleaveage (Boobies) and lot’s of other stuff, but practice your hand drawn dodge and burn, it will set you apart from many others and is a very valuable skill.

First decide on the shape, rectangular or round, rectangular for things like joints, torso, and round for things like shoulder joints and boobies (I love saying that, booooobies heh)

Let’s start with rectangular since it’s easier to understand.

We want to make an arm look round and CG like. Draw a rectagular shape with the marque tool on a layer above the subject, then select transform selection to make the ractagular selection match the shape to enhance, an arm for example,just match the shape roughly no need to fiddle to much. No go to fill and select 50% gray. Select the layer blending mode and set it to “soft light”. That made the gray go away, that’s okay.

Now doubleclick the layer to open the blending options dialog. Click on Gradient Overlay and set the style to “reflected”, check the “reverse” checkbox and set the scale all the way to 150%. You now need to play with the angle to make the direction of the light match the angle of the shape you want to enhance, for example a models arm you want to make the angle of the light match the angle of the arm.

Lastly from the Gradient overlay “blending modes” dropdown select soft light again and OK out of the blending modes dialog box.

Now you have a shape enhancing gradient layer. Try moving it around (Hit V and drag it around) and see how it enhances the shape of the underlying image. Since it’s light in the middle and dark at the sides, it will create more “roundness”, creating that CG look.

Well it doesn’t fit very well now does it? Position the layer over the arm of the model so it fits as well as you can make it. Convert your layer to a smart object (Layer/Smart object/Convert to). Now hit Control+t to free transform the layer. Context click somewhere inside the transformation rectangle, and select “Warp”. Now drag the different areas around so your shape layer fits the arm and hit enter to commit the changes. If you need to adjust the warping later, since we converted to a smart object you can adjust the transform as many times as you want without degrading anything, the power of smart objects.

Last thing you need to do now is add some gausian blur to wipe out the hard edges on your shape enhancing layer, or you can add a layer mask and with a soft brush set to 10% opacity mask out the hard edge. I like the gausian blur method. Because the layer is already a smart object, you get the benefit of non-destructive filters that you can allways go back and tweak.

Another way to mask out the hard edges is to just ignore them while you work on the overall shape, then when you’r done select all the shape enhancing layers and hit control+g to group them. Finally add a layer mask to the whole group and go to town masking out any hard edges.

To realy finetune the shape enhancing layers, turn off the layer with your subject, so only the shape enhancing layers are visible. Then hit shift+control+e to merge them all into a single layer. That turns off the soft light blending mode so just turn it back on for the merged layer and then hide all the originals. Now open up filters/Liquify, turn on the backdrop so you can see your subject. You won’t see the effect of the blending mode in the liquify dialog but don’t worry about that. Now use a low brush pressure and brush density around 10-15 and the forward warp tool to push the shape so the light and shadow flows better with the features of the subject.

For round shapes, you do the same steps, just start with a round selection, and in the blending modes dialog/Gradient overlay select “Radial” instead of reflected. Try to put the round shape over some chicks rack and see what happens

Have fun!