In the traditional photographic darkroom selectively lightening or darkening certain parts of an image was referred to as dodging and burning.
In this tutorial, we'll use Curves in Photoshop for iPad to apply nondestructive dodging and burning to this landscape photo.
I'll start off by darkening the image to tone down the bright sky and bring out more of the detail in the clouds.
In the Taskbar on the right side of the screen, I'll long press on the Add Layer button, and I'll choose Adjustment Layer and then Curves.
This opens up the Layer Properties panel where we can make our Curves adjustments.
I'll drag down on the middle part of the curve to apply an overall darkening adjustment.
And I'll tap on the Layer Properties icon in the upper right to close the panel.
Whenever you add an adjustment layer, it automatically comes with a layer mask.
And we can see this in the white layer mask thumbnail immediately above the layer thumbnail for the image.
If I swipe to the right on this mask thumbnail, it switches to the layer thumbnail, which in this case is the Curves icon.
If I swipe to the left, it switches back to make the layer mask active.
Now what I need to do is modify this layer mask so that the darkening adjustment is only affecting the sky.
In the Toolbar on the left, I'll long press on the Brush Tool so I can see all my Brushes.
And I just want to make sure that the soft round brush is active.
In the Brush Tool Options bar in the upper left, I'll tap on the Brush Size, and I'll make my brush quite a bit larger, maybe about 1200 pixels.
I'll tap on the Opacity control just below this to make sure that my Opacity is set to 100%.
Next, I need to make black my foreground color.
I can do this with the color chips at the top of the Brush Tool Options, or at the bottom of the main Toolbar.
I can swipe vertically on these color chips to exchange those colors.
And with black as the active color, I'll brush over the bottom part of the image to mask or hide the darkening effect in those areas of the scene.
Now I want to add another curves layer so that I can lighten the pathway and some of the plants on either side of it.
Once again, I'll long press on the Add Layer button and I'll choose Adjustment Layer and then Curves.
This time I'll drag up on the middle part of the curve to apply a lightning adjustment to the entire image.
I'll tap on the Layer Properties icon to close that panel.
Instead of painting with black on the layer mask on the areas where I don't want to see the lightning adjustment, which essentially would be most of the image, I'll invert the layer mask.
To do that I'll tap on the Lightning icon in the Taskbar to open up the Filters and adjustments and I'll choose Invert to change the layer mask from white to black.
I'll come over to the Brush Tool Options and swipe vertically on the color chips to make white the active color.
And I'll tap on the Brush Size to get a smaller brush.
Something around 250 or 240 looks good.
Now I can brush over the pathway to apply the lightning adjustment to that area to make the path standout a bit better.
I come over to the Brush Opacity control to lower the Opacity to about 50% which allows me to brush in the lightning adjustment at half strength.
And I'll brush over the plants on either side of the pathway just to lighten them up and make them stand out a bit more and add a bit of visual depth through painting with light.
And I'll brush over the hillside in the distance and lighten that up as well.
If I double tap on the thumbnail for the layer mask over in the layer stack, it shows the mask, and you can see the area that is white is where I painted with 100% opacity over the path.
But where I painted with the brush set to 50% opacity, the color shows up as gray, which is only allowing 50% of the lightning effect to be visible in those areas of the image.
I'll double tap on the mask thumbnail again to go back to the view of the image.
In addition to painting on the layer mask, you can also fine-tune an adjustment by opening the Layer Properties panel and either modifying the curve itself, or you can also adjust the Opacity of the entire adjustment layer in the Blending options to tone down the effect without changing the actual curve.
Using Curves Adjustment Layers and modifying the layer masks offers a lot of control over how the adjustments are applied, as well as different ways you can modify them.
