woah! hold on there!
dodge and burn are handy tools, however they're not the be all and end all... infact, if you're doing any sort of skin tone work, they're best avoided.
basically dodge and burn only work on a colour's lightness, not its hue, and saturation, this results in blown out, and unrealistic tones.
I've attached an image i made to illustrate this;
on the left, is a white to black gradient ramp, with a colour overlay (just using the overlay blending mode). with this, you end up with too smaller gamut of colours to work with, before it gets to black or white. If you want to work with this, you'll need to dodge and burn the greyscale layer, and when you're happy, colourize it to a subtle blue (Its best to play around, see what results you get), to give a better result.
on the right, is the same overlay colour, but dodged and burnt directly onto the layer by hand. you can see how the colours look muddy, and get a bit abrupt. Basically, you'll never see someone with skin like that.
the centre is the best way to do it, this is simply a gradient ramp made from 3 colours, that represent a mid tone, high and lowlights. I got these colours off a handy diagram which someone made (if i can find it, i'll post it) If you use this one, and hand paint it (might be a bit tough with a mouse, i use my wacom) you'll get a much more realistic skin tone coming through.
of course, this doesn't just apply to human skin, any other organic model will have the same sort of gradient, but in a different colour. The only time you don't have to worry about if dodge and burn will look ok, is if you're doing mechanical things.
check out the tutorials on [href]www.poopinmymouth.com[/href]
one more thing, add variation, dirt, graffiti, scratches, dust, whatever in layers after you've got your colours finalised, it'll make things look that little bit better.
Manic
(wow, long post!)
I don't have a sig, live with it.
