Non-destructive Burn & Dodge by Emberotic

A lot of people use the Burn and Dodge tools to make shadows and highlights on their garments; but the problem with them is that if you go to far, or you change your mind about where you want that highlight or shadow, you've altered the pixels, and it's very difficult to go backwards. But there's another way!

1. Hold down the Option/alt key, and click the "Make New Layer" icon at the bottom of the layers palette, to open the Layer Options for the new layer.

2. In the dialog that opens, choose "Overlay" from the Mode drop-down menu, and then click in the "Fill with Overlay-neutral color (50% gray)" check box to enable it. Click OK, and a new layer will be created.

3. Use the Burn and Dodge tools on this layer. Because it's overlay, you'll see the effect on the underlying layer, but you won't actuallly touch those pixels. So you'll be able to change the opacity of the Burn and Dodge layer, or lighten or eliminate the effect in any area simply by painting with 50% gray. This adds untold felxibility to your Burn and Dodge.


Overlay works by using Multiply on pixels that are darker than 50% gray, and Screen on those that are lighter. Pixels that are 50% gray have no effect on the underlying layers, so they are essentially invisible.

However, it is a solid layer, so it will show as 50% gray over any transparency. If that bothers you, just hold down Command/ctrl to select the non-transparent pixels on the underlying layer(s), make sure the Overlay layer is selected, and click on the Make Mask button on the layer palette. (The one that looks like a black square with a white circle in it, third from the left.)

Your layer will look like it normally does, except for the burn and dodging!

Side note for those who are new to photoshop.....Basicallly, Burn and Dodge are tools used to lighten or darken an area of an image. The terms "burn" and "dodge" (and "sponge" are derrived from techniques used in photography development. When you "burn" in an image, you essentially make it darker, and when you "dodge" you make it lighter.

Additionally, you can set your burn and dodge tools to only focus on Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights. This means that Photoshop (or Gimp) will only apply the effect to a specific tonal range (think of it as if your image was grayscale...there are 255 shades of gray in an image, ranging from 0 {BLACK} to 255 {WHITE}). So if you chose your burn tool, and selected "Shadows", your burn tool would only darken the pixels that had a tonal value of 0 - 85 (the darker end of things).