Donkeys on the Trade Route - Nepal

[Manfred M]

This is the last part of the Anapurna Circuit in Nepal. There are few roads connecting the small villages scattered through the Himalayas. Supplies are brought in using traditional means, donkeys and sometimes horses. Unlike me, they are fleet-footed going up and down the rocks that have been laid down as steps.

Given that this donkey train was carrying propane cylinders, I was very happy when they passed me, without slipping and potentially blowing everything up...

[Wavelength]

I smell that rustic life, which is one of the greatest advantage of venturing into such places...

[escape]

I like the scene and subjects but it looks over-processed to me. Particularly the light on the donkeys and steps.

[Manfred M]

I like the scene and subjects but it looks over-processed to me. Particularly the light on the donkeys and steps.

Interesting comment as the light on the donkeys and steps are areas that were not touched in post. Most of my PP work was opening up the shadows and calming the highlights. I also cloned out a few distractions.

This is the straight-out-of-camera origninal. There is a global brightness and mid-tone contrast on the image as a whole as well.

If you click on one one of the images to open Lightbox mode, you can toggle between the two images to see the difference between them.

[Donald]

Taking the two pictures that you've shown above, Manfred, this is a wonderful lesson for any new photographer wanting to study the impact of Dodge & Burn and to study the intricacy of it as a technique in this digital age. I would commend it to any such new photographer as a perfect case study to take time over examining over and over again.

[escape]

I'm impressed! I recently started to learn to dodge and burn. Learned about making subject brighter. I thought that was what was done. So classic. Thank you for explaining.

[Manfred M]

I'm impressed! I recently started to learn to dodge and burn. Learned about making subject brighter. I thought that was what was done. So classic. Thank you for explaining.

Thanks Daniel - I do all my dodging and burning work in Photoshop using a curves adjustment layer. When I work in an RGB colour space, I will generally use a Luminosity blending mode on those layers to ensure that saturation does not change. I generally use the Quick Selection tool as my primary way of selecting the areas I want to lighten or darken, but use other tools as well. The pen tool is a fantastic selection tool, but has a long learning curve. I will also use the Lasso tool and the Polygonal Lasso tool at times. Parts of my dodging and burning will be freehand using a soft, low opacity brush directly on the layer mask, especially when I do faces. I will use the Feather option or the Select tool with the Select menu and will Expand or Contract the Selection, Feather it and then apply a Gaussian blue

I will sometimes work in the L*a*b* colour space because it allows the user to purely work on the luminosity channel, so saturation is not impacted at all. The main issue with that colour space is that colour manipulation is not at all intuitive and takes some time to master.

[Round Tuit]

+1 to Donald's comment with a slight modification; I think that this wonderful lesson doesn't apply only to "new" photographers.

[DanK]

I want to vouch for Manfred's technique of dodging and burning with curves. I learned it from one of Manfred's posts and now use it for all of my dodging and burning. However, I still use a brush rather than selections.

Re avoiding changes in saturation: I often do that as well. However, it is not necessary to switch to LAB mode to do this. All you need to do is change the blend mode of the curves adjustment layer from normal to luminosity. (Conversely, you can also change it to color to avoid affecting luminosity.) Quite some time ago, I did identical edits of an image using the LAB and luminosity blending and posted the results here. The two were virtually indistinguishable. Using a luminosity blend is easier. It allows you to go back and forth at will, and it allows you to blend regular (RGB) tonality adjustments and luminosity-only tonality adjustments in any mix that you want. I sometimes duplicate an adjustment, set one layer to normal and the other to luminosity, and then use opacity to mix the two in varying amounts until I get what I want.

This applies to any tonality adjustment, not just dodging and burning. In fact, I find that it matters more for contrast adjustments than any other, and I have uses a curve to demonstrate this when I've taught how to use luminosity blending.

[Manfred M]

I want to vouch for Manfred's technique of dodging and burning with curves. I learned it from one of Manfred's posts and now use it for all of my dodging and burning. However, I still use a brush rather than selections.

Re avoiding changes in saturation: I often do that as well. However, it is not necessary to switch to LAB mode to do this. All you need to do is change the blend mode of the curves adjustment layer from normal to luminosity. (Conversely, you can also change it to color to avoid affecting luminosity.) Quite some time ago, I did identical edits of an image using the LAB and luminosity blending and posted the results here. The two were virtually indistinguishable. Using a luminosity blend is easier. It allows you to go back and forth at will, and it allows you to blend regular (RGB) tonality adjustments and luminosity-only tonality adjustments in any mix that you want. I sometimes duplicate an adjustment, set one layer to normal and the other to luminosity, and then use opacity to mix the two in varying amounts until I get what I want.

This applies to any tonality adjustment, not just dodging and burning. In fact, I find that it matters more for contrast adjustments than any other, and I have uses a curve to demonstrate this when I've taught how to use luminosity blending.

Dan - I use a combination of freehand dodging / burning as well as using selections. I suspect that the freehand method might work well for your flowers because they generally do not have distinct areas that are easy to select. I find very much the same thing when I retouch faces; these areas tend to be soft and indistinct so a gentler, less distinct touch is often called for when dodging and burning.

My landscape and my portrait work, especially with the clothing, allow for fairly simple and fast selections. The reason I use selections is that they can be a lot faster than hand painting on the layer mask.

The other tool I frequently use is a Hue / Saturation layer mask, often in conjunction with the selection I use in dodging and burning. I generally adjust specific colour channels and rarely use the Master adjustment. I virtually always reduce saturation, rather than increasing it.