Burn, Dodge and Sponge Tools

Straight from the darkroom:

These tools come straight from the darkroom floor where the development process could be tweaked using techniques to change the exposure to the surface of the photographic paper. Before we look at the tools lets examine the darkroom techniques to get an idea.

• Dodge - This is where light is blocked out to make portions of the image lighter.
• Burn - This is where light is allowed through specific holes to expose the paper to more light making it darker.

Understanding that more light means darker and less lighter is just how the tools work. Let's start with the dodge tool.

The shortcut for all of these tools is O

Dodge tool - Making selected areas lighter:

The Dodge tool is really a post production tool. If you aren't happy with how the exposure turned out on your photo you can use the Dodge Tool to increase it. Select your brush and you then have three options: shadows, midtones and highlights. The tool will target the tone that you choose. Finally set your exposure. This controls how intense the effect is.

Using the Dodge tool you can easily increase the exposure of photos. In the following example the left edge of the picture has been lightened using the Dodge tool. The range was set to midtones and the exposure at 50%. The effect is slight but compensates for the overexposure of the left hand side.

The Burn Tool - the same in reverse:

The Burn Tool is really the inverse of the Dodge Tool. Instead of compensating for overexposure it allows you to darken areas that have been underexposed.

Sponge Tool - Adjusting Saturation:

When you adjust saturation you adjust the strength of a colour. With the sponge tool you paint with a brush to either increase the saturation of decrease it. In the following example we have a beautiful photo by Barbara Rich. Using the sponge tool we are going to bring out the colours a little more by saturating them. Specifically the boat and the sky have been "sponged" to saturate the colours in these areas. Conversely if you wish to tone down colours select desaturate.

Blur, Sharpen & Smudge Tool

The Blur Tool makes images obscure and softens an image making it look out of focus with a blur effect. The Sharpen Tool goes the other way and makes an image clearer, it sharpens around the edges of an image. Then we have the Smudge Tool which doesn’t blur or sharpen, instead what this tool does is smudge and bump pixels out of place. 

First thing I want you guys to do is select the Blur Tool and change the brush size to 65px.

TIP: Next to where you changed your brush size you’ll notice an option called Mode and Strength, in the future when you use this tool you might want to take note that you can change how strong you want these tools to be by upping the strength, and also changing the Mode to Darken on or Lighten. If darken is selected it just means the tool will focus more on the Darker pixels and if Lighten is selected it will focus more on the lighter pixels.

So to get the ball rolling, we are going to play around with the Blur Tool, just slowly go over theBackground behind the skateboarder until everything goes out of focus like the example below.

After you have done that switch to the Sharpen Tool and go over the face, arms and hands of the skateboarder.

Now select the Smudge Tool and just zig zag up and down on the shirt pocket till it smudges in with the creases of the shirt.

Too easy yeah? These are quick tutorials, in your spare time try and get more practice in to familiarize yourself with these tools.  You’ll notice later on in the tutorials that you can do so much more with these tools then what I am showing you here. Again, these are the basics you need to learn before we start pumping up the heat. See you in the next lesson!

TIP: Press F12 to start over, might come in handy while your testing out the blur, sharpen and smudge tools.