Dodging and burning techniques, the key to black and white imagery

Dodging and burning is an old-school black and white darkroom process for enhancing black and white images. It was (and is) carried out while the print is being exposed under the enlarger. It’s a process that sounds unsophisticated and largely unrepeatable but it’s at the heart of black and white photography, whether it’s carried out in a traditional darkroom or in photo editing software.

• Other articles in this black and white series
• Why photograph in black and white?
• How to shoot in black and white
• What are the best cameras for black and white photography?
• Converting color photographs to black and white: what’s the best method to use?
• Basic black and white adjustments in your digital darkroom
• Dodging and burning techniques, a key part of black and white imagery

Dodging and burning is used to brighten some areas of an print and darken others. It’s a simple principle but, in the right hands (and it is often done using your hands) it’s genuinely transformative. It can highlight key areas of your photo and darken and suppress distracting elements and backgrounds. It can change the composition of your image, framing your subject and altering the balance of objects and areas in the picture. You can use it to ‘relight’ your images, to add drama and contrast, tonal richness and depth. It’s how you breathe life into black and white images to produce results that are quite different to those you can achieve in color.

If I’ve made it sound like dodging and burning is a kind of semi-mystical miracle of the photographic art, then, well, that probably is what I think. You might use a lighter touch than I do in my imaging and you might have a different feeling about how it should be used, but I think most black and white photographers will use dodging and burning as a central pillar of the monochromatic process. Here’s how it works.

Dodging and burning in the darkroom

In the darkroom, ‘dodging’ is the process of shielding areas of the print while the paper is being exposed under the enlarger. Printing is a ‘negative’ process, so the longer the print exposure, the darker the print becomes. By giving some areas less exposure than the rest of the print, you make them come out lighter, so it’s a good way to bring out shadows or darker areas of the image.

‘Burning in’ is the opposite. Here, you give some areas of the print a longer exposure than the rest. The most common example is ‘burning in’ a bright sky to balance its brightness with the rest of the picture and maybe add some drama to the image. Here, you will shield the parts of the image you don’t want to darken while you continue the exposure under the enlarger for the sky area.

Dodging and burning are really just two sides of the same coin. They are techniques for adjusting the brightness in different areas of the scene. Depending on the picture, you might use dodging, or burning, or both.

It’s not an exact science. Some photographers will use their hands to shield areas of the print during its exposure, while others use more precise dodging tools, such as small discs on a wire handle. The trick is to keep the dodging tool moving so that you don’t see its outline in the print – it’s a bit like ‘feathering’ a selection or mask in a photo editor. For burning in a sky, you might use an object with a straight edge, like a sheet of card, but held a little way above the print to soften the edge.

Whatever tools you use for dodging and burning, it’s a craft rather than a science. You can do some basic calculations around timings, but the rest is skill. The point about dodging and burning is that every print is unique. You can keep notes about the methods and timings and tools you used, but you will never get two prints exactly the same.

With digital black and white, things change. With a digital image, you can of course make as many identical copies as you like. You can also use much more precise masking tools and exposure adjustments. You’re not confined to simple exposure changes, either, since you have a much wider array of adjustment tools at your disposal.

Dodging and burning in software

With digital dodging and burning you use masks to mark out the areas you want to adjust. If you’re using a program like Photoshop or Affinity Photo you might start out with selections, which are essentially the same thing but temporary. You can turn selections into masks to make them a more permanent part of the image and that’s what most photographers would do in these programs. 

These days, masks have pretty much taken over, so that programs like Capture One, Lightroom or DxO PhotoLab, say, will always create masks for those areas you want to adjust, saving them within the image and letting you change or modify both the mask and your adjustments later.

Using selections and masks

Masking tools come in many different types. The simplest is an adjustment brush tool, as found in Adobe Lightroom. You brush the mask over areas of the image ‘freehand’. It’s shown as a red/ruby overlay so that you can see what you’ve selected. You can change the brush size and softness, its opacity and its flow. These let you blend in your mask more subtly and build the effect slowly. You can either brush on the mask and then choose your adjustments, or choose your adjustments first and ‘paint’ them on to the image. Capture One has a Style Brush tool with a large selection of preset enhancements and adjustments you can choose from, and you can choose an adjustment preset in Lightroom too before you start painting the mask. Both programs also offer an ‘auto mask’ mode which restricts the mask to the tones and colors you first click on and can help make your masking a little more selective.

Adjustment/Style Brushes are a pretty freeform approach, but there are other masking tools which can be more useful in specific circumstances. For example linear gradient masks are perfect for darkening bright skies and can do the same job as a physical graduated filter over the camera lens – provided the sky in your image is not so overexposed that it’s burned out. DxO’s Control Lines are an interesting variation on this tool because they come with an eyedropper to select just those colors and tones you want to modify. This is great for shots where you have a tall building or mountain jutting up into the sky which would otherwise be darkened along with the sky.

Radial gradient masks are great for ‘relighting’ a scene, adding ‘light’ to darker areas or intensifying an existing lighting effect. You can make them large enough to cover the whole of the foreground or small enough to pick out individual objects. DxO, again, has an interesting variation with its unique Control Points. These are circular masks that only modify specific tones and colors. In the past these were chosen by positioning the central point, but in the latest software you get an eyedropper for choosing a different sampling point.

Are AI masking tools useful in black and white?

However, the most obvious modern development in photo editing software is AI subject/object selection. Software can now mask specific objects or areas in the scene using AI so that you don’t have to create masks manually at all. Lightroom, for example, can automatically identify and mask skies. It and Capture One can also identify and mask the key subject in the scene with remarkable success, and these and other current photo editors can identify and mask all sorts of other objects, including human faces and features for precise portrait enhancements.

However, while AI masking sounds like the future, it’s not necessarily the right approach for realistic and satisfying results. It creates very precise masks but with hard edges, so that small adjustments look perfect but heavy adjustments can produce unrealistic step-changes in brightness between objects and their surroundings. It’s particularly noticeable with sky masking, where the mask will extend right down to the horizon line and any adjustments you make will apply equally to the whole sky area instead of blending in more smoothly and realistically in the way they would with a linear gradient.

So AI masking is interesting, but for black and white dodging and burning I would say the old manual tools are the best. You rarely need precise masks hugging individual objects but instead you’re looking to blend in your adjustments more progressively with their surroundings.

But what kind of adjustments should you use for this ‘digital’ dodging and burning?

Software adjustments – exposure, contrast, curves

Photo editors will typically have an Exposure slider (if you’re working with a RAW file), a Brightness slider or similar. These can sometimes be all you need but their effect is quite crude. If you’re darkening a bright sky, for example, you can end up making it look a little muddy or flat. This is where the broader range of tools available in a photo editor come into play.

That’s because as well as exposure/brightness adjustments, the areas you’re modifying will often need contrast adjustments too. That was always difficult to handle in the darkroom because you were usually using paper with a fixed contrast grade (unless you wanted to get clever with multigrade paper and using filters while dodging and burning). When you’re working in a photo editor, though, it’s a simple matter to adjust the contrast of an area at the same time as changing its exposure/brightness.

But there’s another way, and one I personally prefer. In a photo editor you can also use the curves tool for dodging and burning adjustments. You can drag the middle part of the curve downwards for a darkening/burning-in effect, or upwards for a lightening/dodging effect. The advantage of this method is that you don’t risk ‘clipping’ any existing shadow or highlight detail in these areas because you’re simply changing the tonal balance within the existing brightness range. Curves adjustments also let you modify the contrast at the same time.

Are there any other adjustment tools you should use? For classic dodging and burning techniques, probably not, though the clarity, dehaze and structure sliders offered by some photo editors can be very useful for adding definition and ‘punch’ to areas of the photo that need extra drama or sparkle.

The success of dodging and burning techniques, though, depends less on the adjustment sliders you use and more on your ability to see what the image needs in order to properly bring it to life – that’s a visual skill rather than a technical one – and subtle control and blending of the masks you use. Again, that’s a visual skill.

There’s no one-click magic in black and white photography, and AI can’t replace the photographer’s own visual skills, and that’s especially obvious with classic dodging and burning techniques, whether they are done in the darkroom or a photo editor.