Dodge and Burn
So what do you do if you don’t have fancy strobes and off-camera flashes and pocket wizards and reflectors? Well, one thing you can do – particularly if you only had two minutes to take a self-portrait in the bathroom mirror before you had to rush off to a Halloween party – is to utilize your software’s capabilities to dodge and burn. These two tools can make a world of difference in how the subject looks in the final version.
One important disclaimer: I really did only have about two minutes to take this shot, and I used settings I normally wouldn’t have if I’d taken a moment to actually look, and this photo gets pushed a LOT during post-processing (as you’ll see!) so please keep that in mind as you consider the photo quality.
First, let’s take a look at the original. You’ll probably note that the color cast of the bathroom’s compact fluorescent light bulbs looks quite similar to photos you might have seen on things like MySpace:
While thumbing through my presets, I quite liked how the following one looked initially, but I knew it could use a little bit of work:
So I decided to head for one of the new features in Lightroom version 2: the brush for applying localized edits. That means that the edits you choose are applied only to the parts you “paint” over with the brush. You can adjust a lot of things with this brush, like saturation, contrast, clarity – and most importantly for this photo – exposure. A negative exposure value makes the painted area darker. In darkroom parlance, this is known as “burning.” A positive exposure value is the equivalent of “dodging.”
You access the brush tool by clicking on the brush icon in the right-hand-side panel:
I find the default menu somewhat unwieldy, but you can change the layout by clicking on the “toggle” button (the tiny rectangle that’s half bright and half dark). I’ll be using the toggled layout for all the settings shown below:
Let’s start by taking another look at the photo after the preset was applied. The background doesn’t really do much for me, so I’m going to start by making it darker. I’ll be using these settings:
The brush will be adjusted several times so that we can get a crisp outline without darkening the subject too much, but the size you see above is a good starting point. You’ll notice too that I decreased the clarity a bit (kind of like adding a bit of blur), the saturation, and the contrast, but the most telling difference you’ll see is with the exposure. A value of -1.10 is just over a full stop difference. This is going to be the first step in bringing out the subject. You can see the area that I burned below in red:
There’s still the matter of the arm showing that was holding the camera and cleaning up a few of the edges, so a couple of more quick edits will take care of those factors. Once the edits are made, they show up as small white circles so that you can re-access them later:
Now, let’s move on to the subject’s face (and I realize that I am the subject, but it seems easier to talk about that fact in the third person). It definitely needs to be brightened up, so I’m going to use the following settings:
In this case, I’m going in almost the complete opposite direction that I did with the background: almost a full stop brighter, adding clarity rather than subtracting, adding contrast rather than taking it away. The idea is to really make the subject the focal point of the viewer’s attention.
This is where I applied these settings:
Subtlety is the name of the game with dodging and burning, so while these values worked for most of the face, I’m going to treat the portion that was already a little bit brighter than the rest of it separately, choosing softer values for the exposure:
This settings will only be applied to the following part of the face:
A quick check reveals that we seem to be on the right track:
I spent a lot of time on my hair last night, and I thought it a pity that the curls didn’t show, so I decided to brighten the portion of my hair that’s spilling over my shoulder. The problem was that it was REALLY dark right there, so I had to use some rather severe settings to make them show up at all:
Yes, you read that right: we’re going to be increasing the hair by over 3 stops on the exposure setting and increasing the brightness as well. I don’t know what the difference between these two values are, to be honest, but I usually just play around with both until I get the look I want. In this case, we’ll be applying these crazy settings only to the hair:
By now you’ve probably noticed that the brush is round, but the areas that have the settings applied aren’t necessarily round or even-edged. In fact, I have some rather severe edges in the example above:
The reason for this is that Lightroom allows you to erase the area that you “paint.” If you click the “Erase” function and then adjust your brush’s size, feathering, and flow, you can customize exactly where those edits will fall:
Editing the flow is especially important, because light rarely falls into hard edges. If you set the flow to something less than 50% and then carefully paint over an area, you can achieve a transparent look that mimics careful shadowing:
The one part of a portrait that most people want to bring out is the subject’s eyes. As you can see because of the angle of the light, the subject’s eyes here are in pretty deep shadows. It would be difficult to work with all the options that the brush tool has on such a tiny space, unless we do something drastic: zoom! We’re going to zoom in to the area we want to work on, which will allow us to make the careful feathering and flow decisions that we need to make the lighting look as natural as possible.
Once again, we’re going to attempt to go for a subtle look, so there are going to be quite a few edits to deal with the varying topography we have. For the first edit, we’ll use these settings:
Pretty standard, really – just an increase of one stop. We’ll apply them to this portion of the eyes:
To really bring out the eye that’s closest to the viewer, we’ll refine the settings and use a smaller brush to make sure that the settings are only applied to the portions below the eyelid:
At this point, I sit back and try to imagine how the scene would have looked if I’d have had the light sources on hand to make this look without the post-processing. If the right eye, the one we were just working on, was really as well-lit as we’ve made it appear, then the other eyelid would also be a bit brighter. So we’ll mimic how we think it would have looked with another brush adjustment:
If we click the brush icon again, we can see how our work is coming along without the white dots that Lightroom uses to show us where the edits are – so they’re there, but you’re seeing how the finished product will look once you export:
I basically did this a LOT and made tiny adjustments for each flaw I saw. Since this IS my face, I was probably a little more critical than I would have been otherwise. In the end, I made a couple dozen adjustments, as you can see here:
But the difference between the first version with the preset applied and the final version with the dodging and burning edits made is quite a difference, right?
