Dodging/burning suggestions in PS

[sothoth]

Hi,

I have a very nice photo of a lighthouse but the sun wass very bright that day so one face of the building is too bright. I'd like to burn that in. The problems I'm having:

1) If I barely get out of the lines with the burning tool (PS CS2), I darken the sky and that really sticks out. If I'm careful to not go outside the line or use a smaller cursor, the uniformity looks terrible.

2) I think there are ways to "mask" off an area and burn the whole thing in at once, but I don't know how.

I'm sure y'all do this all the time and can suggest a better way. Thanks in advance!

 

[Big Mike]

I think there are ways to "mask" off an area

Read up on layer masks, they are a wonderful tool.

 

[sothoth]

Read up on layer masks, they are a wonderful tool.

Do they solve the problem with going outside the lines (I feel like I'm in kindergarten talking about using crayons in a coloring book)?

If I use one of the tools to mask off an area, the problem is that the lines for masking are small/defined, but the transitions between colors are wide/fuzzy, so no matter where I choose to mask, it always turns a transition area that's supposed to look a little fuzzy into a sharp color transition and looks like SH&^.

Or is there some feature of masking that I've just missed?

 

[Big Mike]

You can make the transitions (lines) of the mask...as soft as you want. There are several methods. Firstly, there are many ways to make the selection of the area...with hard or soft edges. Then you can 'paint' the mask on or off with the brush tool...which can be made hard or soft etc.

The benefit of using a mask, is that you can paint it on or off...depending on the color (black/white/grey) that you are painting it with. So you can fine tune it back and forth without worrying about getting it perfect the first time.

You still may have to do some close up work...getting your edges just right..

Photoshop is a vast program with many different ways to do most things. I'm certainly no expert...but the one bit of advice I can give...is to practice, practice, practice.

 

[sothoth]

You can make the transitions (lines) of the mask...as soft as you want.

I'll look again. Until last month I was on an older version of PS and didn't see that there was any way to do this, but now that I'm on a new version I should try again... maybe I'm still thinking of the limitations of the older version. Thanks.