Dodge and Burn. Even though it sounds more like something that might happen in the field of sports or perhaps slang used by state highway troopers, these terms actually refer to photo image manipulation.

Back in the day when the only way to see your photograph was to have it developed in a darkroom, photographers would manipulate the amount of light shining through the negatives being printed to vary the exposure of selected areas on the photographic paper.

This process took place in the printing darkroom where a light source from an enlarging lens shines through the film negative and onto a sheet of photosensitized paper. Photographers used any material with some amount of opacity to hold between the enlarger lens and the photographic paper. By dodging underexposed areas, light was prevented from hitting the paper thus saving some of the details that otherwise would have been too dark to see.

Burning is the opposite of dodging, where areas of the print were deliberately exposed to more light thus making those areas darker on the final print.

White House Ruin by Ansel Adams

Yes, I know this can sound confusing with all the negative, positive, light and dark talk. I find it easier to remember by thinking of burning as making things darker. Getting a sunburn makes your skin darker. And if you dodge under the beach umbrella and stay out of the sun, you will stay lighter. Okay, I’ll admit that experienced photographers might think that analogy kind of dumb, but you see what I mean.

In creating many of his famous prints, master photographer Ansel Adams used dodging and burning to manipulate his images in the darkroom and even wrote a book on the subject, The Print.

Lucky for us, we don’t have to use a darkroom to achieve the right dodge and burn effects on our digital photos.

Coming next: How to Dodge and Burn in Photoshop.