In case you're curious, in a dark room dodging and burning is blocking or adding light that is exposed onto photo paper
You'd use actual tools that would block light when the paper is exposed.
In terms of the actual photo, more light means darker while less light means lighter.
Dodging is blocking light to make certain parts lighter and burning is adding light to make parts darker.
it goes back to old school days of inhaling fumes and playing with enlargers. burning meant that more light was focused onto an area to darken it down a bit, and dodging would mean blocking an area from letting as much light to hit the paper. such as the photo of the cat above, if tina dodged more of the cats dark body it would lighten it up, but could loose detail and if she burnt the counter and wall behind the cat it would darken that part down. you can go to extreme and burn areas to black, and dodge dark areas to almost if not fully white, but always run risk of detail loss.
This is something I have just started to play with a little bit~ I burned the edges to bring more focus to my subject. Probably could be better, but this was my first attempt at it .
Ron - I suggest doing dodging and burning with a layer and a brush, and not the actual dodge and burn tools.
The evil empire called Adobe started a very bad thing with dodge and burn, that works completely opposite to how darkroom dodging and burning work. What happens is your saturation shifts opposite to how it should, changing your colour (in a bad way). There are a few ways to dodge and burn whilst avoiding this, but the simplest way is as follows (works in older versions of Elements, too):
Create a new fill adjustment layer. In this new layer, select mid grey as your colour (50% grey, or 128,128,128 R,G,B). With this new layer selected, change your blend mode to soft light - your image should now look completely normal. If your layer has a layer mask, you can delete it. Rasterize your layer (you can just try to paint on it and it should give you the option). Then, simply paint for dodge using a white brush, and for burn with a black brush. If you use low opacity (or flow) for your brush settings, along with a soft-edged brush, you can easily blend your dodging and burning to make it seamless. And if you accidentally brush over something you did not want to touch, you can just paint it back in with mid grey. I hope that helps! It isn't as perfect as a dodge and burn should be, but it is far better than the provided tools.
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i lightened up the area surrounding my cat's head using the dodge tool.
hope this helps... if not, here's also a quick tutorial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R1rf4fgrF8
You'd use actual tools that would block light when the paper is exposed.
In terms of the actual photo, more light means darker while less light means lighter.
Dodging is blocking light to make certain parts lighter and burning is adding light to make parts darker.
The evil empire called Adobe started a very bad thing with dodge and burn, that works completely opposite to how darkroom dodging and burning work. What happens is your saturation shifts opposite to how it should, changing your colour (in a bad way). There are a few ways to dodge and burn whilst avoiding this, but the simplest way is as follows (works in older versions of Elements, too):
Create a new fill adjustment layer. In this new layer, select mid grey as your colour (50% grey, or 128,128,128 R,G,B). With this new layer selected, change your blend mode to soft light - your image should now look completely normal. If your layer has a layer mask, you can delete it. Rasterize your layer (you can just try to paint on it and it should give you the option). Then, simply paint for dodge using a white brush, and for burn with a black brush. If you use low opacity (or flow) for your brush settings, along with a soft-edged brush, you can easily blend your dodging and burning to make it seamless. And if you accidentally brush over something you did not want to touch, you can just paint it back in with mid grey. I hope that helps! It isn't as perfect as a dodge and burn should be, but it is far better than the provided tools.