Subtitles of the Movie

The Dodge, Burn, and Sponge Tools which are over here in the Tool Panel, can be used to lighten, darken, saturate, or desaturate parts of your image. There are all forms of Brush Tools and have been improved in CS4. They work directly on the pixels in your image and as such are destructive although they can add desired effects to your image. I'm including them in this tutorial since they've been improved but there's another movie on a way to perform Dodging and Burning that's non-destructive. If you opt to use these tools I strongly suggest you do so on a copy of your Background Layer. To do that, click on the Background Layer and drag it to the Create a New Layer Icon and then release and you'll see a Background Copy has been created. The terms Dodge and Burn are leftovers from darkroom days. Dodge means to lighten and burn means to darken. If you have trouble remembering that think of what happens when you burn a piece of toast - it gets dark. The idea is to lighten the areas of the image that you want to draw attention to and darken areas that don't need attention. These subtle areas that you lighten and darken will add dimension and interest to your image. So let's take a look at the Dodge Tool to begin. You specify which range of tones you want to affect: the Shadows primarily, the Midtones, or the Highlights. The Midtones will affect most of the image whereas if you choose Shadows or Highlights the effect will be far more limited to a total range. We'll begin with just the Shadows. You also specify the Exposure Amount, the amount to change to lighten or darken the tones. Usually you want to begin with about 10 to 20 percent. You never want to start with 100 percent. It's far better to build up an effect often while bearing the size of the brush so that the change blends in. So right now I've selected the Shadows at a 20 percent Exposure change and I'm going to go over this baby elephant in the background here. That's made him a little bit lighter. There's before and here's after. But I think he needs to still be a little bit lighter yet, so I'll click and go over him again. Every time I click and release the cursor the effect builds up so it's 20 percent the first time and it's an additional 20 percent the second time. Now I'm going to change the Range to Midtones and I'm going to come over and work on the face of this elephant and I'm going to come back over to the face of the first baby elephant, make him a little bit brighter. And I'm even going to come over here to the parent and make that a little bit lighter. Here's before. Here's after. Now our eyes are tending to go a little bit more toward the elephant trunks. That last change may have been a little bit too much so I'm going to go Command-Z and undo it. Normally you'll need a soft brush to make certain that the effect blends in nicely and as with all Brush Tools you choose your hardness up in the Tool Options Menu Bar. By keeping Protect Tones checked you avoid accidentally clipping shadows or highlights, or shifting the hues, however, be aware that Dodging too much can essentially make an area pure white, so I'm going to just take this to 100 percent and click on here and show you that you can ruin your image if you go too far. Let me back up just a bit. The Burn Tool works similarly but with the opposite effect - it darkens the areas, and again you can specify the Highlights, the Midtones, or the Shadows. This time let's start with the Highlights and I'll go over the background sky just because I don't want it to draw attention. The trouble is that Burning Highlights can often turn them gray and too much Burning in any part of your image can lead to a muddy effect. But I'm going to go over this area, just make the background recede a little bit. At first it was just set to 11 percent so I'm going to do it a second time over here. I might also darken this bush a little bit. And again let's look Before - After. At this point it's much easier for your eyes to rest on the elephants rather than on the background. The Sponge Tool can be used to Saturate or Desaturate an area. Because it works directly on pixels I prefer to accomplish the same task by using a Saturation Adjustment Layer sometimes in conjunction with a Layer Mask because that approach is non-destructive meaning pixels are not changed until the image is actually output. When you work directly on pixels if you change your mind later you risk degrading the quality of the output by having to make an opposite change to the pixels. We'll cover that more in another movie, but just in case you want to use the Sponge Tool to saturate a little bit of an area you can see that you select it and then any area that you go over becomes more saturated. While these tools have been improved in CS4 and can be useful there are other ways to accomplish the same results using Layers and Layer Masks, but these tools are very quick and easy to use.