2 COMMENTS

• Loving my Photography tips and tricks on my Alexa Flash Briefing…. Question… I would like to revisit my today’s flash briefing tutorial that Alexa voiced about the dodging and burning techniques. Where Can I find it?

• Greetings Space Cadet, I am please you have been enjoying my tips on Alexa. Unfortunately I have been keep busy with my clients and I am only getting the time to update the Alexa skill each night and not the blog with the more detail. However below is a copy of the text that Alexa read today on Photoshop Dodge and Burn, and also form my notes for 16 days from now Black and white landscapes. That also discuss uses for dodging and burning techniques. I hope you find this useful.

  Photoshop Dodge and Burn. If you need to lighten (dodge) or darken (burn) parts of you image or photograph, here’s how you do it. No dark room needed. Be easy with this one, as well, folks. Create a new layer via Layer > New… > Layer. Name that layer Dodge/Burn. Change the blending mode to Overlay, and again make sure that Fill with 50% gray is checked. Select the brush tool and reset your foreground/background colours to black/white by pressing D. Change the opacity of the brush at the top of the screen; 5% is a pretty good start, but anywhere above that can be too strong. Brighten highlights by painting in white on the Dodge/Burn layer. Darken shadows by doing the same. It is possible to darken highlights by painting them black, but it tends to turn out pretty bad. Better to use it to accentuate things such as highlights in hair, or wrinkles in hands. It’s most effective on black/white images.

  Black and white landscapes. If you want to take great black and white landscape photos, shoot in colour. By using your digital camera’s raw picture quality setting rather than JPEG, you’ll record a colour image that you can convert to black and white later in photo editing software such as Lightroom or Photoshop. Doing it this way means that you have full control over the black and white conversion, such as using dodging and burning techniques to make specific areas of the photo brighter or darker, split-toning the image or adding a colour-popping effect. Even though you’re shooting in raw format, select the Monochrome picture style on your DSLR. This will give you a useful black and white preview of the image on the rear screen, even though you’re recording a colour image.