Technique Creating contrast with dodge and burn

I like playing the community games here on DoA. When the theme challenge asked for "mysterious" I began looking for something in my archives to fit and ended up having a lot of fun with a couple of photo manipulation tools that don't get enough exposure, so to speak, and so I thought, since I had the layers all up and running, that I would post a thread that might add to your arsenal. As the title says, I used almost exclusively the dodge and burn effects. You can look up what these tools actually do but what it boils down to is they lighten or darken under or overexposed elements. It's like contrast adjustment...but different. I could go into a whole lot of technical stuff, but the best way, IMO, is to simply play with it and get a feel for what it does.

A little background about me and how I use my little point and shoot camera. I make no claim to photographic greatness. I almost never set up a photoshoot, which means lighting? What's that? Wiishu travels with me, he sees something cool and says "MOM!!! Take a picture!" Being a good House Elf Slave, I comply with his demands and then try to make something of it when I get home on my computer.

Having spent a few years as a comic artist, I've got a bit of background in creating dimensionality and focus and that's usually what I concentrate on, in post processing.

Case in point: This cool tree he found at a convention. When flipping through pix looking for a potential "mysterious" I saw this and thought "AHA! Eyeballs would do it." But as you will see, it was a cloudy day, in the woods. Not exactly a whole lot of contrast. Please bear in mind, I can't control your computer screen and mine's pretty bright, so if they look TOO dark, please let me know...also bearing in mind the "mysterious" part of the equation. So...without further ado...



First, I wanted to put in the eyeballs.


I'm not looking for super-realism here, so I went the easy route and just used the redeye tool to insert a couple of eyeballs. I use Paint Shop Pro (because I'm poor) and just superimposed two separate eyeballs. How you adjust the feathering and which you put on top (the larger is on top in the photo, the smaller and brighter is on top in the sample) and how you manage the offset will help to focus your little monster's gaze.



Now comes the fun part.


(ARGH! Please ignore the dd...)

(I also selected his little face and dodge it up a bit. Forgot about that. Looks like I adjusted focus and saturation as well...I'm reconstructing the process from all the various layers...)

I eased back on the dodge layer because some areas were too "shiny" for the "mysterious" look I wanted. Also, I wanted the brightest part of the tree area to be his little feet. Otherwise, he's easy to miss. Also, I burned the underside of the root, darkening that green and making a diagonal dark line up to the eyeballs.

Green is tricky in a picture. Because of the way the atmosphere works on white light and also a lot of stuff to do with evolution and the eyes of hunters, the human eye is sensitive to green. If you find you're having trouble making your eye focus on your main subject, try killing some of the green. Case in point:

That desaturated layer is below the other.


Some other bits that I did included using a sharpening brush along the erased edge of the tree. As you can see, my eraser had a soft edge which in order to wipe out all the bright green hazed the edge of the tree. By sharpening the hazed edge, it superimposed over the solid layer of the desaturated layer and rounded that receding edge of the tree into the background. This is my compromise with a time consuming masking that would ultimately not give me my desired effect anyway. I work hard to actually avoid sharp edges between layers, which is different from the modern notion of high definition digital photography, but which pleases my personal aesthetic tastebuds.

So...there you have it. I can't claim great expertise, but I had fun doing it!

Another useful use of dodge is just to make eyes sparkle a bit more.

Select just the eyes, promote the selection to a layer, and use the contrast tool "fill light" (not sure the PS equivalent, but it brings up the detail in hidden in the dark areas.) to make overlight. You can do the same thing with brightness and contrast tools.


Change the layer to a dodge layer

Erase everything on the dodge layer but the part you want to save

Easy peasy sparklie eyes! (Oh, I put an additional little highlight in, too.)

 

Fun!

I'd never done eyes this way. I was a little surprised how well it worked. Normally I'd just swipe glowing eyes off the interweb somewhere, and paste them in, but it dawned on me that this would probably work. I've done a similar thing with Wiishu's eyes, if they haven't caught the light the way I'd like, where I do the red eye correction on a separate layer and make it a dodge layer. Makes the eyes totally sparkle!

Hmmm...ppl might find that more useful. I'll put together a post for that and add it to this one.

There are so many different ways to do this kind of thing, which amounts to messing with contrast and sharpness and curves to bring out the detail in an otherwise flat image. I've used burn and dodge in the past, but never quite this way. The layering of the same image to bring out the detail throughout was just so fast and easy! Seemed to kind of do everything at once. It's hard to explain exactly what the algorithm is, I used to know, but it manages to keep the colors really lively.

PSP does about everything PS does, but not necessarily as smoothly. Most of the plugins, as I understand, are interchangeable. I've never invested because I just don't do enough any longer. The only thing I've ever really had to turn to PS for was, of all things, painting hair. I know there are people who do beautiful hair with PSP, but I've never figured how, and I've fairly good computers. When I was doing covers, I had one computer with an old version of PS that I would take a layer of the face over to, make the hair, then take back to PSP. Sadly, they don't like to exchange layered images well. These days, I just mess around anyway.

The one thing I guess I bring to the equation is the experience of solving dimensionality problems. LOTS of dimensionality problems. Most of these can be solved with pretty basic photo manipulation...and this shows several of them!