In my pursuit of ever more control of my retouching, I have come up with a new way of “sculpting” images.

First I guess I need to explain what I mean by sculpting. Some time ago I wrote a post on basic retouching. Since then I have taken several digital concepts of dodging and burning{{1}}, merged it with the way a painter friend does glazing, and added my own twist.

In essence, I create several copy layers blurred or sharpened to extremes. I mask these layers and set different blend modes. I can then use levels of grey on the layer masks to affect areas of the image. This method is very versatile and non-destructive. meaning it can be tweaked and changed as the image evolves.

[[1]]I was largely inspired by this article[[1]]