Painting light or dark colors in a layer in any of these modes will result in lightening or darkening of the image. There are endless variations: filling a layer with 50% gray and using the Dodge and Burn tools on that neutral color; creating a multiply layer and a screen layer and alternating the use of each one, depending on whether you wish to dodge or burn. I like simplicity and a minimum of steps (very important with a procedure that you will repeat endlessly) so I create a transparent layer in Hard Light mode. There's no need to fill it with 50% gray; it has no effect other than to make it easy to see your stroke if you isolate the layer.

Whatever mode you use, the key is a small brush, low opacity and a pressure sensitive tablet. I set my brush to 5% opacity and my tablet pen opacity mode to pressure, and I vary the size in direct porportion to the artifacts I am modfying. It's better to build up many small strokes over an area than to try to cover everything with one or two large strokes.

The colors I choose to paint with depend on the image. Often, white and black work just fine, as the only thing we are trying to do here is alter the lightness value of discreet parts of the image. However, sometimes you will run into saturation and hue problems using this approach: merely lightening a dark area or darkening a light area can yield values equal to the surrounding pixels, but with colors that desaturated to blend. It's often a good idea to sample from the lightest highlight (that hasn't gone to white) and darkest shadow (that hasn't gone totally to black.) Setting one color to foreground and one the background, it's a simple click of the "X" key to change them around. That's the beauty of this approach: one tool (the brush) one layer, one key stroke to switch from dodging to burning and back again.

Here is where accuracy is required. The imperfections that you are targeting are small to begin with, and as you progress, they become ever more subtle. If you're not accurate, you'll simply create new artifacts, rather than eliminate those that are already there. It's hard to demonstrate dodging and burning in separate images, since each move is so slight. So here's a before and after shot, with the dodge/burn layer. I set the strokes against 50% gray so they can be seen. In practice, I usually don't bother. Filling with gray is just one more unnecessary step that I don't want to take the time to do. Don't try to count the strokes; it's too depressing. An advantage of switching dark and light colors on the same layer is that you can almost run on automatic pilot; the process of adding strokes becomes a kind of zenlike activity where you don't really notice time passing. It's a small price to pay for beauty.

Painting light or dark colors in a layer in any of these modes will result in lightening or darkening of the image. There are endless variations: filling a layer with 50% gray and using the Dodge and Burn tools on that neutral color; creating a multiply layer and a screen layer and alternating the use of each one, depending on whether you wish to dodge or burn. I like simplicity and a minimum of steps (very important with a procedure that you will repeat endlessly) so I create a transparent layer in Hard Light mode. There's no need to fill it with 50% gray; it has no effect other than to make it easy to see your stroke if you isolate the layer.

Whatever mode you use, the key is a small brush, low opacity and a pressure sensitive tablet. I set my brush to 5% opacity and my tablet pen opacity mode to pressure, and I vary the size in direct porportion to the artifacts I am modfying. It's better to build up many small strokes over an area than to try to cover everything with one or two large strokes.

The colors I choose to paint with depend on the image. Often, white and black work just fine, as the only thing we are trying to do here is alter the lightness value of discreet parts of the image. However, sometimes you will run into saturation and hue problems using this approach: merely lightening a dark area or darkening a light area can yield values equal to the surrounding pixels, but with colors that desaturated to blend. It's often a good idea to sample from the lightest highlight (that hasn't gone to white) and darkest shadow (that hasn't gone totally to black.) Setting one color to foreground and one the background, it's a simple click of the "X" key to change them around. That's the beauty of this approach: one tool (the brush) one layer, one key stroke to switch from dodging to burning and back again.

Here is where accuracy is required. The imperfections that you are targeting are small to begin with, and as you progress, they become ever more subtle. If you're not accurate, you'll simply create new artifacts, rather than eliminate those that are already there. It's hard to demonstrate dodging and burning in separate images, since each move is so slight. So here's a before and after shot, with the dodge/burn layer. I set the strokes against 50% gray so they can be seen. In practice, I usually don't bother. Filling with gray is just one more unnecessary step that I don't want to take the time to do. Don't try to count the strokes; it's too depressing. An advantage of switching dark and light colors on the same layer is that you can almost run on automatic pilot; the process of adding strokes becomes a kind of zenlike activity where you don't really notice time passing. It's a small price to pay for beauty.