Photoshop® Elements 8 After the Shoot

Chapter 9. Making Local Adjustments to Tone and Color

In Chapters 6 and 7 you learned to adjust the tonality and color of your photos using a variety of the Photoshop Elements (PSE) Editor's adjustment tools. All the techniques you used with those tools — with the exception of the Hue/Saturation command — used adjustment methods that affected the entire image. Sometimes, though, it's necessary to change the tone or color of an isolated portion of a photo without affecting the rest of the photo. Fortunately, the PSE Editor provides a wide variety of methods for making these localized changes. This chapter surveys a number of tools and techniques and explores the more important ones in depth.

Using the Burn and Dodge Tools to Adjust Local Tonality

The terms burning and dodging were first used in the chemical darkroom. In this scenario, a negative is loaded into an enlarger and projected onto a piece of light-sensitive photographic paper. The more light that strikes the paper, the darker the tones in the final print will be.

If a printer wishes to make a particular area darker, he makes a second exposure while holding his hand in front of the enlarger lens, blocking most of the light from hitting the paper. He then shapes his hand so that some light is directed to the desired area. This additional exposure is called burning, or burning-in.

If the printer wishes to lighten an area, he holds something in the enlarger's light beam during the initial exposure, preventing light from striking ...