How to Use the Color Dodge and Burn Blend Modes in Photoshop

Here’s a 12-minute tutorial from photographer Blake Rudis of f64 Academy that looks at how you can use Photoshop’s dodge and burn blend modes for your photos. The technique allows you to simultaneously dodge and burn your image while color grading at the same time.

Using a color burn blend mode to illustrate, Rudis makes a color fill layer of a magenta color. By reducing the “Fill” slider value, the magenta tone is only applied to the shadows of the image – that’s at around 15-20% on the slider. You can see the difference here:

Then, using Blending Options, Rudis is able to protect the shadows more by moving the “Underlying Layer” slider to the right. Holding the Alt / Option key while dragging allows you to feather the change, making things much more subtle.

The magenta color is just used to illustrate the adjustment and how strong it is, so once you’ve got the blending looking correct you can change the color fill in hindsight. Once you’ve changed your color, perhaps to a nice blue or yellow, you can play with the Opacity and Fill sliders to perfect it. Fill chooses how much of the image has the adjustment applied, while Opacity reduces the strength overall.

Check out the full video above to see this technique in action.

(via f64 Academy via Fstoppers)