How to Dodge & Burn Like a Pro

There is no shortage of photo editing tips, tricks, and techniques for improving our photography, but the technique that resulted in the most significant improvement for me was Dodging and Burning. When I first got started with photography I often heard the phrase “dodge and burn” thrown around, but never actually understood what it meant or the problem that it solved. If you think about it, photography is a two dimensional medium that’s meant to capture the three dimensional world we see with out naked eye. So basically, photographs naturally lack depth, structure, and three dimension and this in fact is the problem that Dodging and Burning can solve for your photography. 

In this video course, you’ll receive a total of 7 video chapters covering over 80 minutes of teaching content surrounding how to Dodge and Burn your photos inside of Lightroom. We’ll discuss the problems that Dodging and Burning can solve by bringing back the structure and three dimension in our photographs that we experienced when we captured them on-location. We’ll review multiple before and after images that have been dodged and burned and will also discuss how to determine which areas of a photo should be dodged versus which areas should be burned. And lastly, we’ll review the three main tools in Lightroom that can be used to dodge and burn your photos and review each in great detail, from the adjustment brush, to the radial filter, and of course the linear gradient, and will go over three start to finish case studies using each of these three methods.