Improving texture and depth of an image

I've seen the poor burn brush totally misused and misunderstood. To use it to its best ability it has to be applied delicately in small percentages, but not necessarily in small brush strokes. Photoshop allows you to apply the burning brush on three areas:

• shadows
• midtones
• highlights

The two I mainly use are shadows and midtones, these allow me to bring out far more texture and depth in an image you wouldn't see without compromising on the levels in the rest of the image. Of course it's trial and error on any image as each photograph is so different. Start with 'Shadows' at 3%, (I did say a small amount!). If this is too much go down to 1% or 2% and the same goes for the Midtones as well.

This image of a sky has little detail in the clouds giving more scope for improvement.

What I want to achieve is a better definition of the clouds, giving them more texture and depth. I used a very large brush that almost filled the sky, so there's nothing delicate about that.

Using a large brush on Burn tool achieves a more even coverage of the sky.

Using the Midtone at 3%, just sweep over the sky until you're happy with what you see. If you do it all in one go without taking your finger off the mouse you can easily fade what you have done as an extra advantage. Then I used 'Shadow' at 3% for the lower clouds. If we look at this image we will see that there's a big improvement.

You can carry on until you're happy with what you see. The Midtones have brought out the sky colour and more of the cloud. The Shadow Burn tool has emphasised the lower clouds, giving them the depth and texture that was missing and making it a more interesting sky.

Original	Shadow burn at 3%
Original	Burn Tool Shadow and Midtones at 3%

You may think that the originals here are fine, that's a judgement you make to your own taste and satisfaction. But if this has given you that extra knowledge that is useful then I have done my job. I would recommend experimentation for every image as every image is so different.

Do work on a duplicated layer and not the original to ensure you have a backup if things go wrong. It works great on pictures of walls and anywhere that has texture this is a great tool. Just to add as a final note this can be done in the same way for Gimp.