OK, so you’ve taken the perfect picture — only when you go to process it, you notice that there are shadows and/or highlights that make it less than perfect after all. No need to toss it into the digital trash bin, though — instead you can use the Dodge and Burn tools in Adobe Photoshop to fix the problem.
For example, I took this image of some sheep in the woods and loved the smiley face of the little lamb. However, in the original a dark shadow was cast across the lamb’s face and the mother ewe’s face was distractingly uneven. It was time to hit the video2brain library for a solution.
In this free lesson from his course Adobe Photoshop Elements 10: Learn by Video, Tim Grey showed me how to use the Dodge and Burn tools — and I had a feeling that just might do the trick for my shadowed sheep. Tim’s recently released course Photoshop CS6 Image Optimization Workshop also offers some great tips on dodging and burning.
I am embarrassed to admit that I was initially intimidated by the Dodge and Burn tools in Photoshop. It just sounded so technical. However, once Tim showed me that it’s really just painting with light and shadow, I was able to vastly improve my image. I was thrilled to add these tools to the arsenal of “things I know how to do in Photoshop.”
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