Aerandria Staff

Blend-If Burning – ‘Autoburn’

You can burn by hand, but you might make a mistake and not be able to fix it. And burning by hand can affect midtones you don’t want to touch. I hand burned the above image, it didn’t take too long and the result reflects this. Never the less, the parts we need black have been burned.

If you wanted to be able to fix an error you may have made, you can always use an adjustment layer. Quick mask all the parts you need black and then make an adjustment layer that darkens it all. It fixes the problem of not being able to undo burning, but you still have to do that for every page. What if your page knew already what you wanted black? ^^ And so our long boring ‘Getting to Know Your Options’ comes into play~ If we use ‘Blend If’ to cut out all the white, and light grey colors, then it will know where to darken, all on by itself! That could save you a lot of time, and it’s just about as accurate as hand burning.

Now, let’s face it, this isn’t perfect. You might have to brush off some of it, if it effects something you don’t want it to. (By selecting the levels mask, and using a black brush erase some of it.) But it could, with scripts, make bruning a lot faster and more automatic.

A note though, you want to be careful with layer stacking and autoburn. If you place the auto-burn under a levels layer that darkens the lines from grey to black, then aut-burn will not work. Similarly, if you place it above the layer that darkens the greys, it will cut out more. So, keep this in mind when making your script: Layer carefully.

Layer Burning & ‘Auto-Burn’

Even if you level properly you will still need to burn places that should be black, but aren’t. The WORST practise, in my opinion, is burning by hand. The reason I feel this way is because you can never undo it. There are several simple methods with which you can nicely ‘burn’, and still be able to adjust of fix things later, if you need to. The first methods is probably the simpilest way: Quick mask areas that need darkened, and then make an adjustment levels layer that does this. It will work very well and you can alter it any time.