7 Burn Tool
Used to darken
tones
Found at #23 in the Toolbar diagram at left
The burn, and sponge tools are hidden under the dodge tool in the toolbox. To access them, click on the dodge tool icon (the one that looks like a black lollipop) and hold the mouse button down. Choose the tool you want from the pop-up menu.
The burn tool will darken the pixels dragged over according to the percentage chosen in the tool’s options bar [see below]. You can choose to darken highlights, midtones, or shadows. Each must be worked on separately; the tool does not work on all three at once.
To use the burn tool, select it in the toolbox, set your options, and choose a brush from the pop-up palette in the options bar, and drag in the image to darken the chosen tones. This tool has an effect on click, but does not do any additional work until it’s moved (unless you have clicked the airbrush button). However, repeated stroking over the same area does have a cumulative effect.
If you choose Edit > Fade immediately after using this tool, you can change the opacity of the strokes you have just applied.
A shortcut for changing brush sizes while using this tool is to press the left bracket [ to decrease brush size, and the right bracket ] to choose a larger brush. Shift-right-clicking on your document while using this tool will open its Range menu next to your cursor.
Note that these tools cannot be used on 1 bit Bitmap mode, or Indexed color mode images.
The keyboard shortcut for the burn tool is the letter O. You can cycle through the dodge, burn, and sponge tools by holding down the Shift key while pressing the shortcut letter.
The illustration below, is the burn tool’s options bar.
To choose a brush size and type, click on the brush thumbnail. A pop-up
palette of available brushes will appear. Press Enter or click on your
document’s blue title bar to close the palette after you’ve
chosen a new brush. If you want to access the full brushes palette with
its many options, click the brushes palette button at the far right end
of the options bar.
You can also right-click on your document to open the brushes pop-up palette next to the cursor. For more information on brushes, please see the Brushes in 7 tutorial. If you are still using Photoshop 6, find information on the your brushes palette on the old brushes page.
To find any tool presets that have been made for this tool, click on the tool’s thumbnail at the left end of the options bar. To reset the tool to its default settings, right-click on the tool’s thumbnail and choose Reset Tool from the menu that appears.
To allow the tool to continue to darken your picture as long as the left
mouse button is pressed, even when the cursor is not moving, click the
airbrush button.
The box titled Range, and showing Midtones is a drop down menu
of the three tone areas you can work on, highlights, midtones, or shadows.
Image darkening (burning) will occur only in the tones designated. Therefore,
if shadows are chosen in this box, you can drag the burn tool over light
areas mixed with shadows, and only the shadows will be made more dark.
The light areas will be unaffected.
On the right side of the bar is the Exposure box. The setting
entered here determines how fast darkening, or burning of the image takes
place. A high value will cause rapid darkening. I like to use a very low
value, 10 % or less, and stroke repeatedly until I have the amount
of darkening I want. Higher values will often give you blotchy results.
You want the effect to be subtle.
If you have doodled with a tool’s options and want to get back to the default settings, right-click that tool’s icon at the far left end of its options bar (in Photoshop 6, left-click). Choose either Reset Tool to reset only the current tool, or Reset All Tools to restore default settings to every tool.
Please note that all descriptions, and illustrations featured refer to files which are in Photoshop’s .psd format, and which are in RGB color mode. Other file formats, and color modes may generate different options. Some Photoshop features are not available for images not in .psd format, or RGB color mode. To find what color mode your image is in, choose Image > Mode.
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