If you don’t right-click and only select this tool you will be activating the dodge tool and not the burn. It can be found by right-clicking on the magnifying glass tool button. With the photo open, select the burn tool from your toolbar. The first step is to open the photo in Photoshop by going to File>Open and selecting the photo to edit.

Here we are going to darken the right side of the photo for a “in sun and in shade” appearance. It’s a good habit to get into doing this – regardless of what tools you are using! By doing this, you save your original and you can still play around and save your new edited image. Make sure you go to File>Save As and save your file under a new name, like burnimage or something to identify it easily.

This is great, but it also poses problems for those who do not save their original image before they begin marking it up. Most filters and modifications made to images must be made on a image layer, however, with the burn, dodge and sponge tool, you can edit the image directly. Here are two examples of the burn tool at work. However, for the last example, the burn tool works best in partnership with the sponge tool. Photoshop users use the burn tool to change the color of details like eyes, flower petals, general discoloration in a photo and to allow certain elements to disappear into the shadows while highlighting others. Once you activate it you can change the brush size and hardness giving you the desired effect. The burn tool functions much like the brush tool does.

The more you use the burn tool on the same areas, the closer to black they will become. When you use the burn tool on certain parts of your photo those parts with get darker. So what is the burn tool typically used for? The quick answer is: it darkens things. One lightens, one darkens, and one does a little bit of both. The burn tool is often lumped together with the dodge and sponge tool, perhaps because they all are a part of the same tool button on the toolbar. To learn more about the array of tools Photoshop offers, check out the course Photoshop Tools. In this short tutorial we’ll cover the uses of the burn tool, when you should use it and a couple of examples. The fully equipped toolbar gives ultimate functionality to the program allowing users to do pretty much anything they want to an image or photograph. Photoshop is full of goodies for graphic designers, photographers and others who want to design their own images.

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