Well they said it couldn't be done, but we finally have a non-destructive dodge and burn in Adobe Lightroom. And it isn't your grandfather's dodge and burn either. It is essentially a paint brush tool that has the ability to generate masks over your image which can affect the Exposure, Brightness, Saturation, Clarity and Tint of the selected area. I should repeat once more that this is within Lightroom and that the tools are non-destructive, meaning that you can reset and edit the masks that are created by this new tool, at anytime even five years later, the original image file is never altered.

As you can see in the image above (click on the image for a larger image) the Tool Bar in Lightroom 2 Beta has been moved to the right hand panel, just below the Histogram and above the Basic tools. This new Tool Bar now has the Crop tool, the Spot Remover, the Red Eye tool, and the Paintbrush Retouch tool.

1. Mask: You can choose either a New Mask or Edit the selected Mask and set the Amount of the mask.

2. Paint: The Exposure, Brightness, Saturation, Clarity and Tint of the selected area can be set to different Effect levels.

3. Brush: You can preset two brushes (A and B) with different Size, Feather and Flow values and select between Add and Erase those values.

The mask in the sky area of this image is set to control the brightness of that area, you can see the result in the image below.

The turtles have been masked in this image and clarity and saturation has been increased, (without increasing the clarity and saturation in the rest of the image). In this image you can see that the turtles mask has been selected by the black dot in the mask indicator on the head of the first turtle. The mask is in Edit mode so the mask itself is invisble but the Exposure, Brightness, Saturation, Clarity and Tint controls are all available at the same time.

Now that I am starting to become comfortable with this new set of tools I am anxious to try some more images, but I am late late for my deadline as usual, so I will have to upload this article now. Please let me know how you feel about the new Paintbrush Retouch Tool and whether it can take the place of masking in Photoshop CS for you.