Darkroom techniques: dodging and burning

We’ve seen how contrast filters and their digital equivalent, the Channel Mixer, can enhance the tonal relationships in mono images, and how you can use the Levels and Curves dialogs to optimise tonal range, brightness and contrast. Despite all that, there will still be images in which some areas are too dark or too light compared to others. It’s nothing to do with your equipment or your technique; it’s simply the difference between how the original scene looked, and how you wanted it to look. Film photographers make localised adjustments to such images in the darkroom by ‘dodging’ and ‘burning’ – holding back some areas of the print under the enlarger, while giving other areas extra exposure, and we can emulate these techniques to edit our digital photos.

Lightening an area

One of the problems with this image is that the castle itself is a bit dark. The solution is to use the Dodge Tool, which is grouped with the Burn and Sponge tools in the Photoshop toolbox – you’ll find similar tools in other image-editing programs (the Sponge Tool adjusts image saturation, so it’s not used for mono images). It’s better to work with larger brush sizes and low Hardness settings, because this blends your changes in with the rest of the image much more smoothly. Check the options bar to make sure that the Range menu is set to Midtones and the Exposure value to 50%; these are ideal default settings to get started with. Then it’s simply a case of ‘painting over’ the areas you want to lighten; you can increase the strength of the effect by going over areas more than once.

Darkening an area

Next we’ll darken the sky – the equivalent of ‘burning in’ in the darkroom – for which we’ll use the Burn Tool. It’s worth taking a closer look at the tool’s Range options at this point. Usually, you’ll want to stick to Midtones, since this darkens the image without making the highlights muddy. In our sky, however, we’ve got one or two areas of blank white; if we go over these first, with the Burn Tool set to Highlights, we can tone them down to a faint grey that looks more like cloud and less like burned-out highlights. Now, if we use the tool again, with the Range option set to Midtones, we can produce the atmospheric, stormy sky we were looking for. We finish off by darkening the lower corners of the image, to balance that heavy sky and strengthen the oppressive feel.