Dodge And Burn – Skin Retouching In Photoshop Tutorial

Learn how to dodge and burn for skin retouching in photoshop. We are going to use the curves adjustment layer to quickly dodge and burn light and dark areas of the skin. This is the third video in a series about skin retouching in photoshop.

Dodge And Burn – Skin Retouching In Photoshop Tutorial

In today’s video, I’m gonna show you an easy technique for dodging and burning when retouching skin in Photoshop. We are gonna use dodging and burning to even out areas between highlights and shadows, and add a little bit more three-dimensional quality to the image.

Hello everybody. My name is Charles. This is the third video in a series on skin retouching in Photoshop. I’ll leave a link in the description to the skin retouching playlist. So there are a lot of tools for dodging and burning.

Setup For Dodge And Burn – Skin Retouching In Photoshop Tutorial

Photoshop actually has a couple of these tools built-in. Up here in the menu, there’s a dodge-and-burn tool, and there are a lot of ways to set up dodging and burning, but we’re gonna use a fun and easy technique, and it’s gonna use the curves adjustment layer. So I’m gonna come over here and create two curves, adjustment layers. I’ll call one dodge and the other one burn. And for dodge, we’re gonna bring up the brightness like this. And for burn, we’re going to bring the brightness down. Then we’re gonna hit command + i on each of these layers to invert them. Shift and click on both layers, and hit command + g to group them. We’ll call it DB. And that’s it. We’re all set to go. We’re all set up.

Using The Dodge Layer – Skin Retouching In Photoshop Tutorial

So what we’re gonna do is, we’re going to start off with dodge, and we’re going to find areas where there are highlights in the image already, and we’re going to brighten them up. We’re going to use a brush and we’re going to paint with white, and we’re going to keep our flow low, like about 20. So, B for the brush tool, and come up here to our flow, and make it about 20 or so. And, let’s zoom in here. And with a soft brush… And I think I want my flow like around 10 or 11. Select the mask, and in this case, we’re gonna paint right below the eyebrow right here. Some highlights in here. Some highlights here underneath the eye. And, we’re just painting them in where they are right now. So you can see, kind of subtle. And, anywhere in the image where there is highlights that you want to brighten up a little bit that are already here.

One good trick here to kind of see where you’re at is put a different perspective on the face here, if you hit R, you’re gonna be able to rotate your image like this. And so, it kind of gives you a different perspective of how you want to bring in these highlights. You may see something that you want to emphasize, and you didn’t see it before, because you had your image rotated the other way, which is okay, this is just another advantage point. Get the eyes right here, these catchlights. Make them a little bit brighter. Make the brush bigger if I need to. Hit R again. And if I want to go back, I just come up here to the top and say reset view, and a little bit of dodging. You could see some differences there. If I’ve gone too far, I can either paint with black over the areas with my brush, or I can bring the opacity down. Either way. Hey, if you’re getting value out of this so far, hit that like button.

I can make as many of these dodge layers as I want. I’m gonna rename this, say eyes. I’m gonna make a copy of it, but I’m going to fill it with black. And, I’m gonna say lips. Lips dodge. And with that ask highlighted, B for the brush tool, zoom in a little bit, and come down here to lips, and get these highlights here. Just like that. Zoom out a little bit. There’s before, and there’s the after. Sometimes I go a little far, so I want to bring the opacity down a little bit on both of these.

Using The Burn Layer – Skin Retouching In Photoshop Tutorial

Let’s move over to the burn layer here, and now I’m going to zoom in, and get right underneath the eye, making these areas darker, where there is eyelashes and eyeshadow, and it’s darker. Let’s give a little bit more dimension to the eyes, so there. You could see it’s darker. There’s before, and there’s the after. Darken up the eyebrows a little bit. I have my flow about 11 right now. Zoom out a little bit, and see my before, my after.

I’m gonna create another layer, under the burn layer. Fill it with black, select the mask, and then paint with white. And, I’m gonna set this flow even lower, maybe five, and just touch some of the areas out here where I feel like I got it a little bit too light. Let me know in the comments if you use this dodge-and-burn technique.

So the idea is to make this as natural as possible. So if I click alt or option and click on this eye right here, that’s the image before we did everything. So, trying to keep it as natural as possible. I don’t want to change the shape of her face, so that’s the type of retouching I’m going for right here. So again, I’m just lightly brushing any areas that I feel like should be a little bit darker around the outside here. Any of the areas above the eye. Bring the eye out more. And so we’re using dodging and burning to enhance this image to keep it looking natural.

Rework Selected Areas – Skin Retouching in Photoshop

So in case there’s an area you want to go back to, say you went too far with the texture, or the blending of the skin, you don’t quite like how it looks, you can either put a layer mask on the frequency separation group, or you can have it more targeted by going back to the original layer, and say, let’s get the lasso tool. Say we’re not so sure about this area here. We might want to bring some of it back. Hit command + j. So I’ve copied that, and now I’m going to move this layer up, all the way to the top, and I’m going to put a black layer-mask on it. And now, I can paint in the area that I might want to come back. So, there’s that highlight there that I want. You see that I brought that highlight back, so I can do that anywhere on the image.

So that’s a tip in case you want to go back to the original image. Use a selection tool, make a copy of that selection, bring that layer all the way up to the top, put a black layer mask on it, and then paint with white to show the area that you want to bring back.

Make Highlights Pop -Skin Retouching in Photoshop

Another tip to actually bring out some of those highlights, make them even stronger, I’ll make another curves adjustment layer. Bring the brightness up, and then say command + i, because I want to invert that, and paint with white. With my brush tool, I’m gonna increase my flow, and paint in these highlight areas. And so, I only want to see this effect in the highlights, not in my shadows, so I’m going to use the blend-if slider. So if I double click on this curves layer, and I have a video on blend-if. If you wanna see that, I’ll put the card above. And so, I want to see this effect only in the highlights. So I’m gonna start on the underlying layer on the left here, which is the shadow area. And, I’m going to bring this, and you can see it’s affecting the highlights. But what I want to do is click alt or option, and split this indicator right here. And so, that makes a better transition. And you could see that the highlights actually have a little bit more punch to it. So at any time, I can go back to frequency separation if I want to. I can paint on any of the layers. I can do blemish removal. Anything related to texture. I could still go back, and I could still work on any of the dodge and burn also at this point, so, again, the goal of this retouch is to make it natural. Not to change the shape of the face, but make everything blend in: textures, skin tones, and blemish removal.

So here’s our work on dodge and burn. There’s the before. There’s the after. Here’s the original image, blemish removal, frequency separation, dodging and burning, and there’s one more thing I wanna do. I wanna put a levels adjustment layer here. I wanna add a little contrast here. Something like that. If you wanna know more about skin retouching in Photoshop, click on this playlist here. If you haven’t already, subscribe and like this video. And remember, it’s never too late to learn. Thanks for watching. See you in the next video.

See my photography website here 👉 https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com

See the article on blemish removal here 👉 https://charlescabrera.com/skin-retouching-photoshop-tutorial/

See the article on frequency separation here 👉 https://charlescabrera.com/frequency-separation-skin-retouching-photoshop/