You clicked the shutter. You got an excellent image. Great! You will do some retouching, and voilà, your image is perfect. Publish it or print it, and you are done. That’s the usual process of every photoshoot. However, sometimes you shoot a picture. You get a nice pose, an excellent composition, a pleasant expression but bad lighting. You ruined the photoshoot. Ideally, you would like to get everything incredible straight out of the camera and polish it in post-production to perfect it. That’s not always the case.

I grabbed my camera and captured a photo of my friend, Khaled AlBader. I liked his expression. But the lighting was so terrible that the image was not usable to me. So I had to correct the lighting in the picture. I did that by dodging and burning. It’s a technique as old as the camera. But nowadays, digitally with a Wacom, it is much easier and more accessible to everybody.

Look at the image before and after and see the difference.

The image now is much more compelling to the eyes. Dodging and burning the images can alter your photo significantly.

The Gear I Used

I hope you learned a lot from this blog. If you are interested in a one-on-one training session, drop me a direct message on my Instagram account.