- Five Handy Things to Know Right Up Front about Masking
- Editing Your Main Subject
- What to Do If It Doesn't Work Perfectly
- Getting Better Masking Results
- Better Looking Skies, Method 1: Select Sky
- Better Looking Skies, Method 2: Linear Gradient
- Better Looking Skies, Method 3: Masking Objects
- Better Looking Skies, Method 4: Preserving Your Clouds Using a Luminance Mask
- Five Really Helpful Things to Know Now About the Brush Masking Tool
- Painting with Light (Also Known as "Dodging and Burning")
- The Brush's Awesome Auto Mask Feature (How to Not Mask "Outside the Lines")
- Fixing the White Balance in Just One Part of Your Image
- Retouching Portraits
- Selecting People in Group Photos
- Editing Landscape Images
- Editing Your Background
- The Easy Way to Mask Anything (Not Just the Subject)
- Changing the Color of Something in Your Image (Point Color)
- Eight More Masking Things You'll Want to Know
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Painting with Light (Also Known as “Dodging & Burning”)
Another one of our main tools for masking is the Brush tool, which lets us “paint with light” just where we want it. In the darkroom days, this was called “dodging and burning,” which simply means brightening (dodging) some areas and darkening (burning) others. This is way bigger than it sounds (and you can do more with this brush than just brighten and darken, but this is primarily what we do with it, so we’ll start there).
Step One:
Here’s our original image of St. Mary of the Angels church in Chicago. Some areas are quite dark (like inside the arches on both sides, the half dome behind the altar, and the backs of the pews in the foreground), and some are too bright (like the dome above the altar and the windows up top). This is why it’s so helpful to be able to “paint with light” to balance the overall lighting in the scene, just like our eyes do in real life. Once I get the basic overall exposure looking decent, I use the Brush tool to brighten areas that are too dark and darken areas that are too bright. It’s a little weird how the brush works, but once you get it, you’ll actually like it: (1) you drag a slider to a random amount (brighter or darker), (2) you paint over an area you want to adjust, and then (3) you go back to that slider and dial in the right amount. Okay, let’s start by clicking on the Masking icon (the circle with the white dotted lines around it, in the toolbox right below the histogram) to reveal the Add New Mask panel with all the masking tools, and then click on Brush (K) (as shown here).
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Step Two:
Increase the Exposure slider a bit, and then start by painting over the archway on the left (as shown here, where you can see my brush on its ceiling). We’ll do the left and right archways as separate masks, so we can adjust each one individually. The reason for this is the left archway is darker than the right one, so we need to be able to choose a separate brightness amount for each side. Let’s increase the Exposure slider to around 2.20 for this left one.
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Step Three:
Next, let’s click on Create New Mask at the top of the Masks panel and choose Brush (#1) to leave our existing mask for the left archway in place, and start a new mask for the one on the right. Drag the Exposure slider to the right as a starting place (I usually start at around 1.50, but the amount doesn’t matter too much at this point because, again, we’ll choose the right amount after we paint), and then paint over that area inside the archway on the right (as shown here). Now, compare the brightness of this archway on the right to the one on the left and try to get them to have about the same brightness. We only have to move the Exposure slider for this side to 1.48 (#2) to match the same brightness we have on the other side, where we had to bump up the exposure to 2.21. Again, this is why we create two separate masks—so we can control the brightness of each archway separately.
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Step Four:
Click on Create New Mask again to create another Brush mask. We’ll use this one to brighten the half dome behind the altar and the two smaller archways back there. Increase the Exposure slider, and then paint over the half dome. Next, move on to the side archways, which aren’t as dark as the first ones we did, so you can probably get away with using the same amount of brightness as you did for the half dome for these. Here, I’m painting over the archway on the right. By now you’re getting the hang of how this works: (1) Drag the Exposure slider to paint brighter or darker, then paint over an area you want to adjust. (2) After you’re done painting, dial in the right amount of brightness or darkness with the Exposure slider (I wound up at 1.03 here). Note: When you paint over an area, it drops a tiny Edit Pin icon where you first clicked to start painting, which represents the area you masked over. These help you see where you’ve made masks and you can click on them to make them active (more on this in a moment).
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Step Five:
Next, let’s darken the bright dome above the altar and the windows in the back and up top. Go to the Masks panel, click on Create New Mask, then choose Brush (you know the routine), and then we’ll do our two steps: (1) Lower the Exposure amount a bit, and then paint over the dome (as shown here) and windows. Once you’ve painted over those areas, (2) lower the Exposure slider until it looks right to you. In this case, I also had to lower the Highlights slider since it was so bright in those areas, and pulling back the highlights helped bring out a little more detail in the stained glass. I wound up with my Exposure slider set to –0.69, and my Highlights slider set to –58 (as seen here).
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Step Six:
The backs of the pews look fairly dark, so let’s bring out the detail in those areas next by creating a new Brush mask, increasing the Exposure slider, and then painting over the backs of those pews (as seen here, where I’m painting over the pew on the left). Opening up the exposure (to 0.73) didn’t seem like enough, so I also increased the Shadows slider (to 26) and that helped a lot. You can see how that really brings out the detail in the wood—detail that had been lost in the shadows—and it also helps to balance the overall light in the scene.
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Step Seven:
If you look at our image now, you’ll see that we have five black Edit Pins, and each one represents an area we masked (we now have five masks, as seen in the Masks panel here). If you hover your cursor over any one of them, the masked area highlights in a red tint (same as if you go to the Masks panel and hover your cursor over any of the mask thumbnails). If you want to edit any one of those areas, just click on its Edit Pin and you can pick up right where you left off. At the bottom here, I hovered my cursor over three of the Edit Pins, so you can see the areas we masked as they appear with their red-tinted overlays. You can also see why renaming your masks comes in handy as you start adding more masks (we looked at this on page 191).
TIP: Remove an Edit Pin
If you want to remove an Edit Pin from an area, just click on it and hit the Delete (PC: Backspace) key.
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Step Eight:
As a final move, I added one more Brush mask and painted the aisle. All I did with this mask was increase the Clarity amount to make it shinier and more reflective. Here’s the before and after, and you can see what a dramatic effect painting with light like this has on an image.
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